Alvius

Market

Target market

Although we are building a Talent Matching Platform which aims to connect people and companies in almost any market or geography, we currently operate in the recent graduates market for UK start-ups and SME's. We began our journey here for a number of reasons, not least because when we first started the business we were relatively recent graduates ourselves and therefore understood the market. At the same time, we felt barriers to entry were comparably low (which meant we could get going at a basic level and learn from there) and margins are fairly modest; if we can get our business model to work here, it should certainly work for more senior roles.

By our own calculations, the graduate space is worth in the region of £50m p.a. We see that our typical clients have between 5 and 500 employees, with 75% based in London and the remainder largely in Manchester & Birmingham. Sector-wise, we believe that we have our strongest presence amongst startups and growth stage businesses, agencies (digital, creative, marketing & PR) and boutique finance and professional services firms (small investment managers, M&A houses, consultancies, accounting & legal firms). In terms of our candidates, most have between 0 and 2 years of experience and graduated from a top 50 UK university.

Over the next 12 months, and fuelled by the investment we are raising, we will be making our first move into an adjacent market. We plan to offer our service to companies wishing to recruit individuals with between 2 and 5 years of experience (we call this the ‘Grad+’ market) and it is a natural extension of our current position. Indeed, we believe our clients will be largely the same companies. We know there is a market opportunity for us here because our clients have asked us to offer this service and because ‘Grad+’ hires have already been made through our platform, despite our current focus on the graduate market. Additionally, in the region of over 17,000 of our existing members (candidates) qualify as ‘Grad+’, having gained experience since first joining TalentPool in 2015/16, meaning the expansion is an obvious evolution for both sides of the business.

Characteristics of target market

The key factor at play in our market is the percentage of businesses which currently use traditional recruitment agencies. We feel that our proposition is most compelling for these businesses as we give them access to a wide pool of candidates, and a price tag less than half of what they might be used to, whilst maintaining access to a campaign manager who isn't 'selling' candidates into a role.

In the graduate space (where we operate now), traditional agencies are certainly used, however much less frequently than in the Grad+ space. Based on our analysis, we believe that SMEs in our target segments use recruitment agencies for around 10% of graduate hires, but our research (a survey of clients and contacts) indicates that this climbs to around 35% for Grad+ hires (those with over 1 year of experience).

Nevertheless, we think that a good share of our clients have not used us as alternative to a recruitment agency, but have used TalentPool as an alternative to either job boards, direct searching, or ‘word of mouth’. In these instances, we believe TalentPool is more repeatable and reliable than the alternatives and, crucially, we control application volumes and relevancy, meaning that internal filtering requirements are minimised.

We feel that TalentPool is a compelling proposition regardless of whether a company has an internal recruitment or HR team - We've successfully worked with companies with head counts ranging from 6 to over 1,000 employees. The individual we work with in a business can be anyone from the CEO to a manager in the HR or recruitment teams. Fundamentally, we’re all about sourcing the right candidates and whether that feeds into an established system or an individual’s inbox, it still delivers results.

Marketing strategy

We target two distinct groups of potential users: Candidates and Employers.

For candidates, there are two principal elements to our marketing strategy. The first is our relationship with universities and university careers departments. We already have a strong presence here, with more than 20 relationships established and many universities recommending TalentPool as a great route to finding a job at a startup or SME to their students and graduates. The second is our digital marketing and social media presence; we have invested considerably here over the past two years and consistently achieve what we feel is a good cost per acquisition (CPA).

For employers:, we aim to use a combination of traditional B2B engagement strategies, as well as some approaches that we believe are unique to TalentPool. Overall 'marketing enabled sales' is our approach, with case studies and strong content being used to generate brand awareness (e.g. our fortnightly Talent Trends newsletter to 3,500+ readers), which we think has generated inbound leads, referrals and soft enquiries. Our sales team will be building on our existing networks and relationships with 2,000+ SMEs.

Competition strategy

We do have some direct competition, although we feel that none of our peers have yet achieved significant scale. We believe that our more significant competition comes from the incumbent and established recruitment agencies who serve our target market. Here, we are positively differentiated in two key ways. Firstly, due to our automation, we are able to offer our services at a price point which traditional agencies are typically unable to match. Secondly, because we facilitate connections through our platform, unlike traditional recruiters we do not 'sell' candidates to employers or indeed employers to candidates; we believe the result is happier customers and stronger retention.