A lot of people have asked me why I wanted to build TRUST and the answer is simple; the recruiting industry hasn’t fundamentally changed at all in the last 100 years and it is ripe for disruption. Let me give you some context.
It really dawned on me how old and outdated the industry is while working in my most recent “corporate” role as VP People at Casper. Here I was having moved up the corporate ladder to head up all global recruitment for a tech unicorn with a sizable budget to spend, and then in came all the sales calls. People and companies pitching me new “Artificial Intelligence” recruiting tools, “smart sourcing” assistants, and “different models” for recruiting which are all just repackaged contingency or retained search models.
Out of everything that amazed me the most were the calls and emails I would get from recruiters that were pitching me THE EXACT SAME WAY I HAD PITCHED MANAGERS 20 YEARS AGO! I really couldn’t believe that while I had been moving along my corporate journey in APAC and EMEA, absolutely nothing had changed in the recruiting agency landscape and the models had fundamentally stayed the same.
So why has no one innovated in this field? Why can’t we just push a button, connect to and hire the most qualified candidate? Well, it turns out that contrary to some opinions, recruiting is actually a very difficult problem to solve! But don’t worry, we have a plan 😊.
Our belief is that the first step to solving this problem is to bring the entire 152 billion dollar global recruiting industry online and digital. There are over 1 million recruiting agencies globally. The industry is completely fragmented and still working in the dark ages. Think about it, hundreds of agencies in one city alone and no one has any idea about who they are, what they do, and if they are any good. There’s not even a global database of all recruitment agencies! By bringing this entire marketplace online we can help hiring managers find the right agency when they need to make a hire, and in the long run building this platform moves us towards our goal of helping everyone in the world find a job.
This problem was especially highlighted to me while working for Google and Uber. I was charged with expanding Google in Southeast Asia and Pakistan, with my Ops recruiting team charged with growing Uber from 20 to 47 countries while launching UberEATS in EMEA. At both of these jobs the process of finding the right agencies to use was incredibly difficult and downright inefficient if not futile! It typically involved asking contacts or friends of friends about agencies or recruiters they knew for referrals or word of mouth, but this proves to be incredibly difficult when recruiting in places like Accra, Johannesburg, Krakow, Lahore, etc. Why wasn’t there a simple website that I could look up to tell me what agencies were available with some ratings and feedback to let me know if they are any good? Well, that’s what we are going to solve.
At TRUST we believe that the first step to modernizing the recruitment industry is to bring transparency to the current recruiting agency landscape. The market is incredibly fragmented and we will only be able to start working on real change in the industry once we are able to bring this whole recruiting world online. After that we can start to solve the bigger question of how to make recruiting more efficient and ACTUALLY modernize for the 21st century.
— Alexander Dengler
Co-Founder, TRUST