Meet the 30-year-old transforming recruitment with AI

One to watch!

We interviewed Snap.hr and here is what they said to us about their company and how it is transforming recruitment by using Artificial Intelligence.    

Three reasons you should be watching them 

Vital statistics:

The need to know

What problem are you trying to solve?

Snap.hr believes traditional recruiting and headhunting methods are outdated and inefficient. By using cutting edge technology and in-house recruitment experts, Snap.hr is solving these issues, improving matching, transparency and communication between candidates and companies, which as a result, is increasing not only hiring but also retention rates within roles.

For example, due to Snap.hr’s unique matching tools, 95 per cent of candidates will respond within 48 hours of being contacted by a business and the average time to hire is only 12 days, which is half the industry standard.

How big is the market, and how much of it do you think you can own?

Currently, Snap.hr has over 1,600 companies using the platform, including Tesco, Argos, Transferwise, JustGiving and SkyScanner, amongst many others.

Additionally, 12,000 candidates have used Snap.hr to discover highly sought after positions in leading UK based and international businesses. Currently, Snap.hr operates solely in the UK market but the company does have a number of international clients, so is growing rapidly. Additionally, Snap.hr has plans to expand to other markets in the near future.  

How do you make money?

Snap.hr is free to use for all candidates using the platform. Any company wishing to recruit can submit their business (which is vetted by the team at Snap.hr) onto the platform free of charge.

Once the company makes a hire through Snap.hr, they will be charged a 12.5 per cent fee per hire (which is lower than the industry standard of 18 per cent).

Currently, Snap.hr is only open to highly skilled tech talent, who are actively looking for jobs and businesses looking to hire. The platform is not open to recruitment agencies or recruiters.

Who’s on your team that makes you think you can do this? 

By implementing a combination of AI and machine learning technology, with Snap.hr’s in-house recruitment experts, the service is abolishing the need for traditional recruitment methods as well as recruiters.

Although Snap.hr is currently aimed at hiring for positions in the technology industry, its recruitment solution is potentially also scalable across other industries. The Snap team includes myself, Raoul Tawadey, (Co-founder and CEO) and Roberto Pérez Nygaard (Co-founder and CTO) plus a great team of 11 staff members, all based in London, UK.

Since we founded the company back in 2015 Snap.hr has quickly become the go-to recruitment platform of choice for companies hoping to find highly skilled tech talent. 

Who’s bankrolling you?

To date, the business has received seed funding from Connect Ventures, BoxGroup, Peter Read, and Siraj Khaliq (Co-Founder of Climate.com and Atomico partner), the amount of which is undisclosed.

Snap.hr is currently profitable and is also looking to build on its initial investment in the future, in order to scale the business across further markets and grow the team.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs trying to secure that kind of finance?

One piece of advice that I would give other entrepreneurs is to always stay focused on the end goal. Keeping our goals in mind when speaking with investors has allowed us to become profitable in a short space of time.

What do you believe the key to growing this business is? 

For us the key is our cutting-edge AI and machine learning technology combined with our team of in-house experts.

What metrics do you look at every day?

At Snap.hr we’re always monitoring our hiring and retention rates. Traditional recruiters act in between candidates and companies to sell both parties to each other, this means that sometimes the role isn’t quite what a candidate expected and they only learn this on their first day – leading to a large percentage of people moving to a new company within the first three months.

However, we put candidates and companies in direct communication and by doing so, Snap.hr is enabling them to work out if there’s a good fit.

As a result, over 95 per cent of candidates who have been placed via Snap.hr are still in the same role six months after being hired.

What’s been the most unexpectedly valuable lesson you’ve learnt so far? 

We’ve learnt how important it is to be in the right market at the right time. Currently, the demand for good developers in the UK is very high and given that our goal is to help the best tech talent discover their ideal job, the UK is one of the ideal markets for us to be in right now.

What’s been your biggest mistake so far? 

There haven’t been too many mistakes along the way but we have learned that it’s very important to plan ahead.

At Snap.hr we’ve always had the vision of where we wanted to go, but when we first started we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to achieve our goals. Now we focus far more on reviewing our targets, say for the next 24 months, and evaluating the company each month to ensure these ambitions are met. 

What do you think is on the horizon for your industry in the year ahead? 

Technological advances are fundamentally changing the industry and will continue to do so over the coming months. 

Snap.hr’s vision is to use technology to reshape the way you find your next job, by combining AI innovation with human intelligence.  

Which London start-up/s are you watching, and why?

There are so many London startups doing great things but right now for me Improbable, DeepMind and Babylon Health are the companies to watch as they apply cutting edge tech to enormous real-world problems, which I believe will be transformational, if they work.