Intern Avenue

Idea

Introduction

Named “Best Recruitment Start up” at the Europa Awards last year, Intern Avenue is a multi-award-winning recruitment platform designed to connect the thousands of employers who collectively expend huge annual budgets sourcing and selecting from the large pool of potential student and graduate candidates (“interns”).

The Technology - The platform acquires and standardises candidate data using proprietary algorithms and processes to create an automated candidate recommendation and matching engine. In short, we play match-maker helping the best fit candidates connect with the right employers.

For Employers - Intern Avenue finds and differentiates quickly between candidates who match open positions, aiming to reduce the time and expense of the traditional recruitment process.

For Candidates - Intern Avenue automatically matched them with position which suit their skills and markets them in a secure and private environment to the employers most likely to hire them.

Intended impact

With the cost of graduate recruitment reaching anything up to £3bn each year for UK companies (ILM 2011), Human Capital (even at entry-level) is important business. Increasingly, companies are investing in talent early using internships and placement schemes. In fact they are becoming the established transition between academic and professional life; in some industries it is now expected that a third of their entry-level intake will come from such programs (HighFliers 2013).

Despite demand for this talent, we see the lack of adequate recruitment support and affordable hiring options as a major factor in the high rate of graduate unemployment (currently 7.3% as of January 2014), causing long-term employment issues for candidates. Even short periods of not being in education, employment or training at early age can lead to a £50k lifetime wage loss, costing UK an estimated £77bn/yr (Impetus, 2014). While candidates struggle to stand out, employers (particularly SMEs) have increasing problems finding the right talent. By way of example, skills shortage vacancies nearly doubled since 2009 even though employers receive 85 applications per graduate job advertised (UKCES, 2014).

In our view, currently most employers must settle for very limited exposure to the potential market. And that many HR offerings are expensive, labour intensive or mass market solutions designed to provide interested applicants (irrespective of relevance or suitability). These include: campus recruiting, job boards, vacancy posting on the company’s own website, using agencies, accepting speculative applications, CV databases, or social networks; all of which we consider having the potential to be slow, undifferentiated, time-consuming and expensive.

Intern Avenue’s competitive advantage is in technology and approach. Our system is built on Primary Predictive Profiling. The site’s candidate recommendation engine is designed to act like a talent aggregator, job post, candidate screen and applicant manager in one. It has been built to allow our clients to be able to assess and hire good quality talent within days rather than months.

Substantial accomplishments to date

Intern Avenue launched in late 2012. Its brand is a registered trademark and the business has a international patent pending for its matching technology.

Press and Recognition:- Intern Avenue has attracted some high profile features include articles in the Financial Times and Evening Standard, and successfully pitching on Dragons Den. In addition, Intern Avenue has won a number of awards including:-

· Winner – BBC Dragons Den 2013
· Winner – Europa Award 2013 - Best Recruitment Start Up
· Winner – Business of Software 2013 - Avangate Scholarship
· Semi-Finalist – CISCO BIG Award 2013
· Winner – Blackbox Accelerator Program - Silicon Valley 2014
· Finalist – We Own It Global Venture Competition - USA 2014
· Commissioner – Future of Work Government Project 2014

Traction:- The site is generating early revenues.Our clients include AOL UK, Carphone Warehouse, and Gymbox.

Monetisation strategy

Intern Avenue is free for candidates to join. We also offers prospective employers the opportunity to preview the talent pool for free providing a ‘best-fit’ list of candidates for certain roles.

"All you can hire" basic packages start from as little as £26 per week.

Intern Avenue charges employers a simple subscription that offers unmetered platform access for a defined period of time. . We aim to offer a range of options for businesses of all sizes.

The value for SMEs is that cyclical and ad hoc intern support can be in their office in a matter of days even for unknown employer brands. The value for blue chips is that they can target their hiring process towards desirable qualified candidates who they might not otherwise capture.

Use of proceeds

Intern Avenue seeks capital for further development, sales, and marketing. This capital will be used to grow its FT team and hire additional dedicated sales and marketing people to handle the enquiries we are receiving.