The Startup Magazine Q&A Sessions with John Haworth CEO of Hireducated

Hireducated is a market place for skills, bringing together bright students and dynamic businesses.

Hireducated is a marketplace for student talent. Hireducated provide companies the access they need to source students for skilled jobs. We find talented part time staff without high agency margins with a social design that rewards hardworking students.

1) Who is Hireducated aimed at, can anyone signup to it?

A business of all sizes, and students living and working in the UK, Hireducated uses the different sizes and scales of business to qualify student skills. Small businesses can find affordable part time skills while larger companies can find the crème de la crème of experienced students.

2) Where did the idea for Hireducated come from?
I worked my way through university in a bar, one day I noticed my boss’s accounts were a mess, I mean they weren’t accounts they were two boxes of receipts. I offered to sort this out but “not for the £6 an hour I was paid for pulling pints” He said yes. A friend, who is a designer from Goldsmiths, asked how she could do the same. I helped her pitch our boss for redesigning the restaurant branding and soon we had about 5 students working on site on all sorts of jobs, translation, design, accounting. It was great.

While I was working there, I met Adrian Smalley and Jimmy Gasteen are the CTO and CEO of Precursive who became our founding inventors at Hireducated. We got talking about a student website they wanted to build, they asked me in to show how the way our system worked in real life, we ripped in to the idea for hours and at the end of it they turned round and offered me a place on the team. I don’t think I have ever had a normal job interview in my life everything has always been “Hey I can do that” something we have kept at Hireducated.

3) How is Hireducated different from other jobs sites, what makes it unique?

The big thing for us is time, The average lifecycle of a recruit is 6 weeks, covering letter, CV, interview. This is OK if you are interviewing someone with years of job experience but the margins are so much smaller at a graduate level. We ‘recruit’ students at undergraduate level to build a portfolio of experience before they graduate. We are with students for 3 years +, and during that time you can choose affordable, flexible skills knowing that your investing in the future of your employees. Its that assurance that a standard job wall or agency finds it hard to commit to.

4) How long has Hireducated been in the making, and who is the team behind Hireducated?

16 Months now, 12 months of bootstrapping and we launched a beta in September. The team is Gary and I, Gary is a great CTO, most guys you shake hands with in London who are serial entrepreneurs say “hi I’m Dave and I have exited my fourth business” With Gary he says nothing but when you walk in to his house the walls are lined with files of businesses he has built and sold. We are also really lucky to have Michael Doyle MD of Evolution software as NED and Katelyn Donnelly CoS at Pearson Education as an advisor. Katelyn and Michael are the embodiment of everything an advisory team should be.

5) What has been your biggest challenge so far at Hireducated?

Without a doubt reining in our ideas, I have a box full of development plans for new business integration, new talent measures, and my personal favourite the business incubator where students can be hired in teams or mini companies to give entrepreneurs proof of concept for their businesses while still having the safety net of being at university. Unfortunately you would never achieve anything chasing all of these so “Do one thing and do it well” has become a personal motto

6) What methods are you using to get both employers and job seekers signing up to Hireducated, are these two different approaches?

Not really, I’m very hands on, for a lot of people Hireducated is the solution they are looking for, so I spend a lot of time with companies and students, obviously your selling something but. Social media, conferences, and direct sales come it to it but anyone who tells you they created a start-up without having to pound pavements and get out there is kidding you.

7) In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with Hireducated?

Massive growth, well of course every start-up wants that. Personally I want to launch at universities outside of London. Hireducated is about getting the best talent and the best opportunities, companies should be able to access the smartest students in the country not just the best talent who’s can afford to live unpaid in London. Some people might call that social mobility I call it a business plan.

8) If you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?

A times running a business can feel time running away from yourself. Putting your ideas out there for others to judge and open them up to be either successes or failures is a test of skill and will. Don’t take it personally if your idea fails, learn to develop and ‘pivot’ and let your ideas evolve naturally. If you work hard you will build something you never pictured but is precisely what you wanted.