Revolutionaries come in all shapes and sizes. And sexes. Take Virginia Raemy, a slight, soft-spoken 29 year-old Swiss-German entrepreneur.
Ms Raemy, a graduate of Yale and top European business school INSEAD, is a former investment banker with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank where she specialized in company valuations and financial modelling.
She has set out to radically transform the job recruitment marketplace for both employers and recruitment agents.
Analyzing the publicly traded online recruitment companies as part of her role, allowed her to study the UK recruitment industry. Her investigation convinced her that the £27 billion industry is ripe for innovation as the economic downturn forces public and private employers to seek ways to reduce the cost of recruiting staff.
This is where Raemy sees an opportunity for her start-up company, TalentPuzzle, to set new benchmarks for the industry by creating an open, online arena for recruitment transactions.
Currently, employers and recruitment agents are locked in an inefficient system of individual, one-on-one negotiations, in which an employer can be dealing with dozens of agencies for a single advertised position. This means multiple contracts, multiple fees, multiple negotiations. And spiralling costs.
The TalentPuzzle solution is to empower the employer to post the job one time only with the fee they are willing to pay. This procedure gives two immediate advantages to the employer.
First, admin costs are reduced by sending one post instead of numerous postings and having to engage in individual fee negotiations with many recruitment agents.
Second, it brings transparency to the process as everyone knows what’s on offer and agencies, in trying to lock-in the offer, send the employer better CVs in a timely manner.
The TalentPuzzle database allows employers to rate and rank recruitment agents according to established criteria (quality of CVs, services etc) so that an employer can see from the rankings which recruitment agents receive good ratings, thus saving administrative time and cost.
Ms Raemy believes that small and medium sized companies, who are normally subject to the terms set by the big recruitment agents, will find the TalentPuzzle system especially attractive as it levels the playing field and gives them a degree of control over costs and contract terms.
TalentPuzzle is a free service for employers. It makes money by taking a percentage of every placement fee paid to a successful agency. The service offers an 8 week money-back employment guarantee and handles all billing and contracts on behalf of the employer.
So what’s the attraction of TalentPuzzle for recruitment agents?
First, it will allow them to use their time more efficiently and profitably. According to Ms Raemy, “The typical recruitment agent spends 50-75 percent of their time sourcing new business, ie, finding vacancies they can work on.” This is done via cold-calling, networking or other marketing activity. “But by being with us they can just sign on to the site and get access to vacancies without spending any time sourcing them”. This frees them to spend their time more usefully building direct relationships with employers rather than on activities that do not contribute to the bottom line.
And, she says, because of the wealth of data produced by TalentPuzzle from the day-to-day transactions of employer and recruitment agent, it becomes a source of real life and real time data on their own and their competitors’ performance.
Finally, small and dynamic agencies will get a more even access to pitch their candidates to the big employers.
The corresponding benefit to employers is that they get access to a wider and more varied pool of candidates.
TalentPuzzle, which began trading last summer, received start-up funding from Venrex LP, an early and growth-stage venture capital company.
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