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New to Market

25 April 2025
Construction & property, Graduates/Apprentices/School leavers

National student lettings agency launches apprenticeship scheme

In a bid to support young people and grow skilled and knowledgeable individuals for the student lettings sector, loc8me recently launched its 18-month programme, which is open to anyone aged 16-18. The scheme will offer hands-on experience, mentorship and the opportunity to engage in paid work.

Raffaele Russo, founder of loc8me, said: “We’re thrilled to launch this apprenticeship programme, giving young professionals a real chance to learn, grow and begin building a career in an exciting industry.

“Now more than ever, young people are seeking opportunities, guidance and goals to pursue. With this programme, we’re investing in their future – and in the future of the lettings sector.”

Apprentices will have the chance to study the theoretical and practical elements of the lettings industry, and on starting, they will be given a mentor from the loc8me team to support their development via regular meetings throughout the course.

loc8me now operates in 13 major university cities across the UK, including Loughborough, Durham, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leicester, Hull, Bath and Bristol.

Freya Watson-Russo, academy co-ordinator, said: "At loc8me, we’re committed to nurturing the next generation of letting agents. … We’re giving young people the chance to build a future, gain confidence and carve their own path.”

Founded in 2008 by Russo, loc8me manages more than 2,500 properties and employs more than 75 staff members.

(L-r) Apprentice Ollie Coe, loc8me's marketing assistant and academy co-ordinator Freya Watson-Russo and apprentice Isabel Tebbutt ©loc8me

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14 April 2025
Creative/Digital/Media, Engineering

NEW TO THE MARKET: 14-18 APRIL 2025

• Manufacturing and engineering specialist Busy Bee Recruitment has relaunched its website. The refreshed online platform has a modern design and enhanced user functionality, offering an intuitive browsing experience that makes it easier than ever to explore current vacancies, submit CVs quickly and securely, access expert recruitment advice via a blog and submit vacancies directly online.

• Deel, a global payroll and HR provider, has launched a suite of AI-driven products to help companies hire, manage, and pay international teams. Deel will offer an all-in-one global workforce platform integrating payroll, HR, and IT, designed to support compliant operations across borders. Key updates include: Real-Time Payroll in over 53 markets (expanding to 130+ by 2027), offering instant calculations and faster processing; Deel PEO for offering top-tier benefits without enterprise-level costs; Benefits Admin for simplified, compliant benefits management across countries; Deel Talent for streamlined recruitment via trusted agency networks; Workforce Planning, Compensation, and Engage tools – powered by AI – for smarter headcount strategy, global pay management, and employee development; IT Lifecycle Management features like MDM, IAM, and EPP, supporting global device and security control.

11 April 2025
Creative/Digital/Media, IT/Telecoms

Spotted Zebra merges Interview Intelligence and Assessment in one platform

This is technology that transcribes, analyses and evaluates conversations through an AI-powered lens. The merger connects assessment results with interview data, addressing the growing challenge enterprise talent leaders face: making confident, objective hiring decisions when candidate information can be fragmented across multiple tools.

In a statement, Spotted Zebra says that enterprise talent acquisition teams are facing twin pressures from AI-generated candidate applications and deepening skills shortages. 

The launch responds to a critical market challenge, the statement continues; while more than three in four businesses report widening skills gaps, employers are inundated with applications with around half of all jobseekers using AI tools to apply for roles. Current solutions force companies to choose between expensive, disconnected systems or compromise on either assessment breadth and depth, or a scalable interview process and structure.

“We’ve integrated Interview Intelligence with Assessment because our enterprise customers are facing unprecedented challenges in talent acquisition,” said Ian Monk, co-founder and CEO of Spotted Zebra. “By unifying these previously siloed technologies, we’re enabling talent teams to make data-informed decisions based on a complete picture of each candidate’s capabilities.”

Unlike standard Interview Intelligence tools that primarily transcribe conversations, Spotted Zebra’s implementation establishes a data framework that truly connects skill measurements across different evaluation methods:

  • Real-time skill evidence mapping: Comprehensive role skills profiles are automatically created thanks to AI-powered intake meetings between recruiters and hiring managers. 
  • AI-assisted interview questioning technology: The AI-powered Interview Guides automatically generate targeted question paths for specific role skills profiles and each candidate.
  • Consolidated hiring evidence dashboard: The Decision Kit combines summarised skill data from both assessment scores and interview evidence, weighting each source appropriately based on predictive validity for specific skill types. 

According to the company statement, AI in Spotted Zebra enhances human decision-making, ensuring the final call on a candidate’s suitability for a role is objective, data-backed and always in the hands of the hiring team.

Headquartered in the UK, Spotted Zebra was launched in 2020 by Monk and co-founder and chief commercial officer Nick Shaw.

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10 April 2025
Creative/Digital/Media, Executive search

NEW TO THE MARKET: 7-11 APRIL 2025

• UK recruitment firm HRGO has launched ‘Betty’, an AI agent tackling recruitment ghosting by ensuring all job applicants receive feedback. Since its December 2024 launch, Betty has provided personalised insights to over 40,000 candidates. A survey of 1,000 users found 90% valued the feedback, addressing a major frustration in the hiring process at scale. Betty was named after Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Parkinson, the founder of HRGO back in 1957.

• Recruitment firm Sowena Group has moved into new headquarters in Manchester city centre. Perran Cooke launched Sowena Group last summer after more than a decade in the recruitment industry, including roles as regional MD for the North at executive search company PSD Group and as a director at Axon Moore. Sowena now has a team of five and has taken office space at The Tootal Buildings on Oxford Street. The company statement says Sowena Group is expected to deliver more than £650k in revenue this year.

Senior recruitment consultants Dave Kreitz and Mackenzie Harrop have joined Sowena in recent weeks, along with Leah Allen as head of marketing and Megan Buckley as marketing executive. Cooke said he expects the team to grow to 10 by the end of this year, creating roles for recruitment consultants, back office and support staff, market research specialists and a non-executive director. Sowena Group focuses on senior finance posts in high-growth and private equity and venture capital-backed businesses across the North-West and beyond.

14 January 2019
Hospitality/Leisure

Start-up of the Month: Sixty Eight People

Dunn has struck out on her own, having been a director at hospitality staffing specialist Bee Recruitment and having headed up recruitment and training Revolution Bars Group.

She told Recruiter her experience in the sector is a unique selling proposition (USP) for her agency: “I think my 10 years in operations and further 10 years in hospitality recruitment is my USP. I understand the pressures at site and company level for not having the right person in a role. It’s debilitating.

“Add to that the annoyance of having poor quality CVs hitting your inbox and the pressure to respond to them. I dealt with multiple agencies during my in-house role with Revolution Bars Group – I know what they are offering and I know we offer something different. Our best clients are our advocates. They seek advice on their process, on their salaries, on the current marketplace, on how they are perceived as an employer.”

Dunn revealed the agency also offers interview training for clients and is working with Manchester-based profiling company Arctic Shores, which designs game-based psychometric assessments.

Looking ahead, Dunn added the firm is seeking to increase headcount with plans to recruit a talent manager, whose sole purpose will be to look after the agency’s candidates.

9 January 2019
IT/Telecoms

Former Apprentice candidate Thakrar strikes out on her own

Trishna Thakrar, a candidate on The Apprentice back in 2016 who joined Martin’s business at the start of 2017 to head up its technology and financial systems division, has now left to set up her own business technology recruitment agency, TT Tech Solutions.

Speaking to Recruiter this morning, Thakrar revealed she left HRS at the end of October and launched her new business at the start of December, which focuses on technical positions within organisational financial systems recruiting professionals working across a range of roles from analytics development to business analytics to software development.

Thakrar added that working with Martin and Lord Sugar at HRS enabled her to build the confidence to realise she could strike out on her own having built up a strong network before joining HRS.

“Leaving HRS was a big decision. It was a big decision taking the position in the first place because I had a lot of exposure coming out of The Apprentice and it was the first thing really that came my way. I didn’t look at anything else or seek investment because I had this opportunity but for me, I didn’t have the confidence coming out of The Apprentice to say ‘I can do this by myself’. Being there and seeing myself do it at another company without much need for help or support – that I could do it all on my own – it only made sense for me to come out of there and build a business for myself.”

One of the other benefits of working with Martin, Thakrar says, was learning to do business the right way and with purpose.

“He [Ricky Martin] is definitely an inspirational person… He’s very professional and he’s done things the right way. There are so many recruitment businesses out there and the way some of them operate are very different. I think the business is very ethically run. He has just given me the confidence and the know-how to say, if you are going to set up a business do it the right way. Don’t just try and make a quick buck. Have a purpose.”

Thakrar explains her new agency’s purpose is to move with technology. “Technology is going to be consistently moving. If I’m not keeping up-to-date with things, we’re not going to move forward. It’s about staying at the cutting edge of technology and all the new things coming through.”

And having built up such a strong network, Thakrar has been able to hit the ground running. “It’s moving forward a lot quicker than I thought it was going to. At the start, I thought I was going to have spend six months really building it, making a bit of money, building up the revenue and then kind of spin out, start hiring people, get an office and get things moving... I am anticipating that by around March, I’ll have a team of about four. I have already started recruiting. I’m having a few interviews. I’ve got one person that should join me this month and then I’m hoping by March I can really take off from there – so fingers crossed.”

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7 January 2019

Halka becomes new CFO at Adecco UK & Ireland

Yann Halka, who has worked at Adecco Group in France and Switzerland for the past 10 years, most recently as vice president of budgeting and management reporting, takes on the role.

Before his tenure at Adecco, Halka worked in a number of corporate and operational finance roles at oil & gas contractor Saipem and Orange. At Orange, he was responsible for the mobile network operator’s financial controlling activity in Africa, which included ensuring the effective return on investments, cash delivery and launching new operations in Central Africa.

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7 January 2019
Retail, Transport & logistics, Creative/Digital/Media, Industrial/Manufacturing, IT/Telecoms

NEW TO THE MARKET: 7-11 JANUARY 2019

• Talent acquisition services provider Consult Inhouse has opened. The London-headquartered firm, which is partnering with organisations across the UK and has been launched by Steve Lorde and Karl Chatterjee.The firm aims to tackle gaps in the way agencies and recruitment process outsourcing providers engage with SMEs, and seeks to help them build their own high-performance talent acquisition functions.

• Dublin-based duo Niall O’Kelly and Mark Baker have partnered with recruitment investment firm Recruitment Entrepreneur, led by James Caan, to launch their financial recruitment consultancy Darwin Hawkins. This is entrepreneur Caan’s third investment in Ireland in recent months, alongside Hayward Hawk in Belfast and 360 Search in Dublin. 

• Early careers mobile app Fledglink has launched. The app aims to bridge the gap between the final years of students’ education and the period when they start looking for work by offering a free-to-use dedicated social network for 16-24-year-olds, focused entirely on educational and professional support.

• Multi-brand specialist global recruitment firm Frank Recruitment has opened its seventh US office in Scottsdale, Arizona.

• Guardian Jobs is launching a new marketing campaign to highlight its rebrand. The career site’s campaign aims to highlight how Guardian Jobs’ portal helps clients find the right people for roles, and aims to give Guardian Jobs a personable approach.

The multi-media campaign, designed with in-house agency OLIVER, will run across display, press, paid search, email, social and podcasts across the UK and makes use of wordplay, adopts a light-hearted tone featuring illustrations by long-standing Guardian collaborator Matt Blease.

The strapline ‘Find a job where you can be you’ appears on one ad, focusing on two thumbprints high-fiving each other; another has a box of matches branded ‘Happy Matches’, encouraging people to ‘Spark something great’.

• Contract recruitment company Procurement PeopleCloud has launched. Targeting the procurement and supply chain industry specifically, the recruitment platform aims to ensure firms in those sectors have instant access to a large, verified pool of experienced procurement professionals through its Odesma Assessor Aurora analysis.

• Industrial recruiter Recruit Right has opened a new office in Argyle Street in Birkenhead. The Birkenhead office is the latest satellite office venture for Bromborough-headquartered Recruit Right, which also has recruitment centres in Blackburn and Greater Manchester.

Recruit Right’s decision to set up the new base comes as the Wirral Growth Company, a joint venture between Wirral Council and its commercial partner Muse Developments to fast-track economic growth, moves forward to create thousands of local jobs through regeneration plans for Birkenhead.

• Totaljobs has launched a new brand identity and advertising campaign. The new brand is represented in part by a signature ‘T’ and is the result of the careers site’s collaboration with creative agency DesignStudio.

The careers site has also announced a new multi-channel brand campaign. Incorporating the new tagline of ‘Get everything you need from a job’, the campaign explores what matters most to people and features real workers as part of its cast. Launching with a TV spot across terrestrial and digital channels, the campaign also includes radio, outdoor, mobile and online, and runs from 1 January until 31 March in the North of England, reaching more than 8m people.

• UK digital recruitment agency Trust in Soda has opened a new division in Dublin, headed up by Tom Madeley. Trust in Soda (Ireland) is based in the WeWork at Dublin Landings, part of the city’s docklands redevelopment. 

 

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