Introducing Circular

Four months ago we launched The Hiring Circle from within Vernon, our consulting firm for startups, around the idea of scaling talent recommendation amongst a community of startups.

We have been following a very lean way of iterating on the product, the idea and the business, and we’ve been brutal about proving hypotheses and discarding features and paths that didn’t work, always with simplicity as the main moving force. We even re-used the Vernon brand, with its yellows and blacks.

Before the summer, in “The Hiring Circle, one month in”, we explained in detail the results of our first experiments and our first numbers. We also pledged to share our path to building the product and the business, so here we go.

Enter Circular

This week The Hiring Circle is becoming Circular. Recruitment meets circular economy.

Circular is a private community in which startups refer candidates they interviewed and loved, but who weren’t the exact right fit. We’ll match these qualified people with other startups in the community which are looking for great talent. It’s a win-win situation, and it’s free.

Recruiting top talent has always been a hugely inefficient, expensive process and we think Circular will mark the beginning of a total transformation of the industry.

For companies hiring with us, Circular helps them build on the idle capacity currently being wasted when talented people are interviewed but not hired. Additionally, it helps improve the candidate interviewing experience, even if they were turned down since they’re being referred for other amazing opportunities with the community.

Candidates love being on Circular because their experience is so much better than the recruiting industry currently offers:

• We do not have CVs or “job applications”, we manually match candidates with our hand-picked opportunities we think fit them best.
• Only when the company expressed their interest in meeting them, do we ask the candidate about the opportunity.
• If the candidate likes the opportunity, we do a very personal introduction to both.

Everything is confidential, discreet and efficient, words that are not usually associated with recruiting. If you’re looking for opportunities in great companies you can request to join Circular!

We’ve been busy

During September we have been planning our next steps and working on the new Circular brand with the amazingly talented team at Mendesaltaren. Creating a brand is not just designing a logo, choosing a typography and some colours: we went deep and learned a ton about our product, our users and our business just by thinking about the brand and the design system. We will share all those learnings and the process in another post coming soon!

We’re also extremely happy to announce that we’ve closed a pre-seed €100.000 financing round, by a simple convertible note, with 7r Ventures that will help us focus and scale Circular even faster. Carlos and Ángel are great investors to have on board and are already working with us to shape the product and the business.

Ah! And we’ve got a new team member: Juan González. Juan is joining Circular and brings his insight from years working on recruiting, for companies and recruiting agencies, and a very startupy mindset from his time at HitFox incubator in Berlin.

What’s next

Now many of the largest, more interesting companies in the Madrid startup ecosystem are already hiring and referring talented people on Circular: Carto, Cabify, Spotahome, On Truck or Jobandtalent. Mid-size and smaller companies like Bipi, Playtomic and Clarity are also enjoying hiring with us.

We’re beginning to understand the marketplace dynamics and what candidates and companies want the experience to be like. Our immediate focus is on growing in Madrid within technical functions. But next up we have our eyes on opening in Barcelona while writing our expansion playbook for bootstrapping new cities in new countries. While we walk that path we will explore monetisation strategies that will help scale even faster.

Our goal with Circular is to become a global hiring community, with new values in the recruiting industry and making the hiring experience not suck.

At the risk of sounding a little bit typical: this is just the beginning.

Try Circular!