March 4th, 2021
We are pleased to welcome ITR to ReEcho. ITR brings a wealth of experience and influence in the technology talent market. I have come to realise that access to capital in the category that is ‘growth tech’ in Europe is not necessarily the biggest indicator of ‘winning’ - access and goodwill in the engineering talent market often is. A top software engineer can obtain a job / contract pretty much anywhere these days. What increasingly matters here therefore is trust and relationships. ITR, alongside our other recruiters on ReEcho, bring just that. I am excited about our continued partnership with ITR and building our technology out further to support our vision of delivering value to the world of hiring and recruitment.
In Oct 2020 I announced that we have been working on a 3 sided exchange to deliver more valuable hiring experiences for talent, recruiters and employers, and followed up with a post in Dec about our first official partners DigiSpace joining ReEcho. Since then, we have had Jefferson Wolfe join, as well as a number of independent individual recruiters who have joined ReEcho as independent business owners too. ITR is the latest in the chain of other great recruiting firms and recruiters to come. Thank you to all of you that have joined. I look forward to our continued work together.
Our vision has not changed. We look forward to welcoming all clients and talent onboard our app to improve the status quo of the hiring and recruitment market at large - we are simply prioritising relative to the resources we have today. As our 1st engineer Carl says - ‘tech is all about what by when. Almost anything is possible with the right people involved’.
Truth is, before announcing our official partners joining our platform, we already had quite the list of suppliers in the ‘growth tech’ category (with over £1.5 billion in transaction volume, 8000+ recruiter staff and over 2 million talent between them - which, on the talent front, is coincidentally about the number estimated to be employed by the growth tech category in Europe) - hence starting here in regards to product rollout. Of course not all this transaction volume is processed by ReEcho (yet!) - but this provided us with the scale and granular supply side insight needed to handle some of the most challenging hiring mandates in the market. It has also given us great focus as to how to ‘go to market’ with respect to our technology product launch.
When I showed my Dad the list, he could not quite believe the numbers - it went something like this - (on zoom screen share):
Me - here is our 2020 supplier list (the ‘legacy business’) that we are turning into official partners on the iOS app that Carl and team have built - you can see (excluding the larger listed players) just over around £350million in transaction volume to tap into as a first priority - they have already signed our docs. Also many of the top market makers in the firms on our list are currency setting up their own businesses which we are so excited to support...
Dad - which docs?!
Me - ones we drafted. You know my lawyer husband Pete that I married. Yeah, well, he drafted the docs and Tia and I get our recruiters’ directors to sign up!
Dad - No way. Where is Pete, why is he not on this call?!
More important than the docs and the numbers however, is the recruiters’ trust and commitment to collaborating. I am humbled by the goodwill amongst this category of the market to work with us and more importantly one another - more on this below!
I am also especially excited about the many family businesses the industry is composed of, and women setting up on their own (I learnt, I think in ‘Lean In’, that women outperform men in representative style negotiations - and this is what recruiting is all about - representing the interests of others!). Recruiting is also a business that lends itself to flexibility. One can essentially run one’s company from one’s phone! Not surprisingly, the many men we work with care about flexibility too. Often when I am on the phone to Greg (founder of ITR) and Richard (founder of Jefferson Wolfe) they are with their kids, managing complex transactions from their phones.
(I) Internal ‘Buy Side’ Recruiter - as a rule, largely works on fixed income (e.g. a monthly fee) rather than a commission based compensation structure. If providing this as a service, we often refer to the costs as Process Costs.