The story is two-fold. I’m a two-time tech founder and when I started my first business, Tedbree, which basically builds software for companies – I realised that it was just quite difficult to constantly innovate fast enough because so much of your time is taken up by trying to find talent.
If I needed someone, I needed them today, not after along-winded hiring process where if I needed a new hire I had to speak to a recruiter or put up a listing on a career page and spend a painfully long time interviewing thousands of candidates. So I thought that there should be a quick way for you to identify a quality candidate.
As there are so many parties involved in hiring, I began thinking about how we can bring them all together and create one comprehensive platform. By doing that I then began to push the idea even further and consider the future of hiring processes.
My son has a speech impediment and so I started thinking about how the system that we’re creating would be biased against my son, so how can we solve this and create something that not only allows you to hire faster but also solves the bias problem?
And in doing that we also then realised the volume of candidates that get ghosted during the hiring process and don’t know what for. So then we also sought to improve the candidate experience and essentially the final product aimed to solve a three-fold problem: How can we simplify the entire hiring process? How can we eliminate bias? And how can we improve candidate experience? And that’s the story.
The business has done fantastically, considering we officially started trading less than a year ago. We’ve been able to grow our business and adapt its offering based on the issues that I identified earlier, which has made it a stronger platform than if it had just centred on talent acquisition.
In terms of successes, we've been able to have access to 10million profiles which is incredible considering that, when we just started around a year and a half ago, we didn't even have a million users. This was actually achieved through a founder I met on Foundervine’s Black Venture Growth programme. His company is called Web Automation and while we were talking he said that we may be able to partner and potentially use a combination of his platform and partner to extend our reach. This really helped us get more profiles.
We’ve also been able to complete a pilot with over 30companies, and have now started onboarding hundreds of others, so we’re growing by the day and have managed to secure funding to support this. In addition to our pre-funding of £750,000, we've raised over a million pounds so I think we’re in a really strong and exciting place!
As your business has grown, how has your personal brand scaled at that time?
Yes, as my business has grown, people have understood that this person knows what they’re doing and, as a result, they have more confidence to approach you so my personal brand has definitely grown over the course of the year. I’m also constantly putting myself out there; I completed your Black Venture Growth Programme alongside others in the UK and recently won the Businesswoman of the Year award at the Foundervine Future Awards ceremony, so that has also helped elevate my personal and brand profile simultaneously.
I’ll say that everything works hand in hand, especially if you have the role of a CEO. What I mean is that it's not just about customers, but that your overall reputation and brand identity matter; it’s important that you and your business are being perceived as role models that others can follow or take inspiration from. You can't build one without the other.
If you build your personal brand, it will definitely trickle into your business – all of the very strong and remarkable companies are founder-led – and whether intentionally or unintentionally this personal brand-building will impact your business operations and success.
So, for everyone out there that is trying to do this, I feel that is one area that they could look into.
We have very very big plans for Tech1M next year. We plan on slightly re-structuring the company a bit and having an umbrella group name classed 1M People under which we’ll have Tech1: mainly for tech-focused hiring, and we're then going to launch K1M: which is going to be for hiring within the healthcare industry. We also hope that we can have another segment which is specific to the hospitality sector
Also, our initial strategy was to really just hone in on the UK, but now we're beginning to see possibilities for expansion into other markets, including Africa and Nigeria to be specific, as well as Saudi Arabia potentially. We are also considering an acquisition in Nigeria; it’s early talks but these are the kind of things that are going on at Tech1M right now.
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