What is it with tech jobs in London (and, lately, the rest of the UK)? Well, ask a silly question, right? Because the city and the country is going through a tech boom right now and when that happens tech startups in the recruitment space scramble to join the fray, especially in the UK capital. There’s even a “Silicon Milkround” to compete with the usual ‘milk rounds’ of the banks.
For starters, online marketplace for technical talent Hired today opens its first overseas location, citing the booming UK tech industry and – they say – over £10m in job offers over the last sixteen weeks. Hired has raised a total of $32.7 million from investors such as Lumia Capital, SherpaVentures and SoftTech VC. The London launch comes after a successful four-month trial period in the United Kingdom. London is quickly becoming one of the company’s largest markets alongside San Francisco and New York.
“London has always had a good ecosystem for startups, but the recent rise in technology companies choosing to locate there indicates an unprecedented demand for qualified tech industry candidates,” says said Matt Mickiewicz, founder and CEO of Hired. He cites government initiatives such as TechNation as helping the rise.
On Hired, top companies apply to you, and you choose which ones to interview with, rather than the other way round. As a result, says the company, candidates on Hired respond to over 90% of interview requests, compared with a 10-20% average response rate to InMail requests on LinkedIn.
There are plenty of others joining the fray. Breaz, Tyba, Hiremyfriend and Hytch just to name a few.
Also today, hiring marketplace JobBox.io launches in London after landing €750,000 in seed investment, led by Portugal Ventures, with support from Best Horizon.
Founded a year ago by entrepreneurs Pedro Oliveira and José Paiva, initially out of Portugal, JobBox.io plans to scale across Western Europe, fuelled, they say, by a cash rewards system built around peer referrals.
The site — launched out of the Startup Lisboa incubator in Lisbon — requires a referral from a candidate’s network before being processed to the application stage. Successful hires result in referral fees to the referer from between €250 to upwards of €2,500. They estimate that there are 8,000 tech jobs in Portugal that go unfilled and 44,000 a year in the UK.
Pedro Oliveira says “We don’t use auctions like Hired or Breaz because we don’t think tech professionals are commodities and clearly we are not alone, as Matt Buckland, Head of Talent at Forward Partners UK agrees with us. Employers can’t just spam-post a dozen positions without thinking, and we’ll often jump in and help hiring managers get the right content to attract the best candidates.” Clients so far include Spotify, Skimlinks, Typeform and Workable
Meanwhile, Hired sent us some interesting stats they’ve about the UK’s tech jobs scene.
Key indicators for strong hiring demand across technical roles in the UK:
• 600+ interview requests made
• Average time to hire – 19 days
• UK salary ranges – £40k-£85k
Initial data on salary ranges for different roles:
• iOS Developer – £56k in London vs $130k in New York
• Ruby Developer – £51k in London vs $119k in New York
• Javascript Developer – £54k in London vs $117k in Seattle
• UX/UI Designers – £61k in London vs $104k in Los Angeles