People Club, founded in 2020 by former early-stage BCG Digital Ventures employees Jason Waterman and Michael Curds, is taking its next large step into the HR Technology world, alongside the growth of the core Consulting business.
Waterman and Curds have spent the past 12 months building a significant People Consultancy, enabling their clients’ rapid growth via their Recruitment-as-a-Service model as well as supporting Series A fundraising and international expansion through their embedded People Consultancy offering.
They’ve recently made several key hires to expand their offerings, including initial senior hires into the Recruitment-as-a-Service model and their Leadership Coaching and Development arm. Waterman and Curds pioneered the ‘embedded talent model’ when at BCG Digital Ventures, building the founding teams for 20 VC backed businesses across 10 countries, starting back in 2016.
Waterman said “We always say we are incredibly lucky to work with businesses that are experiencing rapid growth, as we get a front seat ride as they expand and scale. Our role in that is to ensure that these amazing companies don’t break themselves, and more importantly their employees.”
People Club offers both a Consultancy point of view and given the years of experience, the Co-Founders Curds added, “Our aim is not to take up lots of employees’ time, provide a 300-page presentation and disappear into the distance. The sole purpose of our recommendations is to enable businesses to scale in the near and long term, and one of the best ways to ensure this happens is by helping the projects move forward ourselves.”
But the ambitious team is not stopping there. They’ve spent the past 6 months developing a product in stealth mode, and recently announced the soft launch of hya, which will be aimed at the ever recruiting, but always time-poor start-up market. Hya aims to help Founders reduce the time spent on recruiting and provide them with key insights gained from their 40-year careers.
They have recently made 4 hires into the hya team, including CTO Nick Procopiou, with plans to launch the product fully to the start upmarket in early 2022. Curds said, “we’ve spent many years working with barely adequate, and often substandard, recruiting and HR tools. Working so closely with start-ups and scaling businesses gave us the perfect opportunity to explore this further.”
Waterman added, “given the knowledge we already have in this space, we know so many of the key pain points founders, people and talent teams face. We feel the start-up market is massively underserved and we’d like to change that.”
Hya already has several Alpha users, with promising feedback and a pipeline of interested users in both the UK and Germany. Waterman and Curds have big plans for the product, believing it can help solve all key “people”, Human Resource and Talent Acquisition issues over time.
Fundraising is the next step for the hya team, with the Co-Founders actively talking to investors in the UK, US and Germany, and clear growth plans for 2022 already outlined. They aim to significantly increase their Product Development team across Engineering, Product Management and Design, as well as key hires in the Customer Success, Sales and Marketing spaces.
The Leadership team behind hya and People Club believe that the two perfectly dovetail, and can support their customer’s growth both in the UK and also internationally.
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