Finding the right talent is tough. Companies pay big dollars to recruiting firms to pinpoint and woo the most qualified candidates. Recruiting firms typically execute one of two (very pricey) strategies: a retained fee or contingency fee structure. It isn’t uncommon for recruiting fees to range within 15-20 percent of the recruited employee’s pay.
So a $100,000 recruit costs a client $25,000. If the recruited employee leaves the company early on — within a typical 90-day trial period — the client doesn’t recoup the placement fees. That’s $25,000 they’ll never get back.
“It’s a $450B industry,” says Chase Morrow, the successful founder of two large Birmingham-based recruitment agencies — ITAC Solutions and Moxy. Morrow recently sold his shares in both ventures to launch Fetch, an online subscription-based staffing platform.
Fetch is like Tinder, but for staffing, Morrow said. For the talent, who register for free, it works like a dating app — mark interested, your profile is sent to the employer. Not interested, and you move on with nobody the wiser. Morrow says that this makes the platform “talent driven,” so talent decides which employers it wants to ‘date.’
For employers, Fetch removes the unnecessary expense of the third-party agency recruiter middleman. Companies pay $99/month — that’s $1,188 per year — for access to a wide range of candidates. Compare that to the $25,000 for one hire brought on traditionally. Morrow said that Fetch has saved its customers $650,000 in agency fees in the first quarter of 2017 alone. The company’s customer retention is matched in strength to its customer acquisition — which is high.
So far, Fetch has 138 companies and thousands of users signed on, and operates in most states and in several countries. During our one-hour lunch meeting, Fetch saw 27 new signups and 48 matches. Fetch raised a small initial round and plans to raise a second round to scale.
This month, Fetch plans to launch a Yelp-like feature within the platform that allows talent to recommend profiles and their peers to companies. If there’s a match, the recommender is paid a bonus.
Kathleen Hamrick
is an Alabama native serving as Innovation Depot’s Director of Marketing & Education, where she has played an integral role in the implementation of for-credit experiential programs for students with interest in entrepreneurship, innovation, and technology. In her spare time, Hamrick is a Books Running sponsored ultramarathoner, occasionally flies single-engine prop planes at the Birmingham Flight Center, and frequently dreams of building a kit plane: Cessna 162.
