A Tameside entrepreneur is setting his sights on transforming the UK’s recruitment industry and beyond after launching an AI-powered hiring platform that is already attracting professionals from every corner of the world.
Bradley McLaughlin, originally from Stalybridge, spent more than a year developing the platform after becoming frustrated with the traditional recruitment sector while running several social care businesses.
The official platform launched just over two months ago and has already attracted thousands of professionals, predominantly across the UK, with users also signing up from countries including the United States, Australia and Brazil, to name a few.
Speaking about the inspiration behind the business, Bradley said the idea came from years of dealing with expensive recruitment fees and inefficient hiring processes.
“The recruitment industry has been so challenging for so many businesses,” he said. “It’s a market worth around £85 billion a year in the UK, yet many agencies are simply connecting employers with candidates and charging up to 25 per cent of someone’s annual salary.
“When I spoke to businesses across the country, everyone was saying the same thing. They wanted something quicker, more dynamic and more effective.”
The platform uses artificial intelligence to match employers with suitable candidates based on factors such as experience, location, salary expectations and availability. Rather than employers spending hours searching through large numbers of CVs, the system presents only candidates who closely match the role.
At its heart, Consula is built around two simple but powerful principles: making it quicker and simpler for professionals to find the right opportunity, and making it quicker, simpler and fairer for businesses to find the right person.
Bradley said: “People have described it as ‘Tinder for professionals’. You simply enter your requirements, and the AI provides the best matches. It streamlines the process, saves businesses time and makes it much easier for professionals to find opportunities that genuinely suit them.”
Businesses are currently being offered one year of complimentary access and hiring, before the platform moves to a subscription model which Bradley says will remain significantly cheaper than traditional recruitment fees.
He believes reducing recruitment costs could remove a major barrier to growth for employers.
“Recruitment fees often become a tax on growth,” he said. “If we can remove those costs, businesses can hire more people, professionals have more opportunities and everyone benefits.”
The platform has already begun attracting significant institutional interest, with key partnerships forming across the public and private sector. Bradley has also received backing from prominent political figures who are actively supporting Consula’s mission to fundamentally change the way recruitment works in this country.
Alongside the recruitment platform, the business is developing a career progression module designed to show candidates how they can develop within an organisation over several years, rather than simply matching them to a single vacancy.
The company is also working with universities to improve graduate employability. After recently speaking about artificial intelligence at Manchester Metropolitan University, discussions are underway to introduce the platform to students from October when they return for the new academic year.
Although the platform has only been fully live a few months, the business has ambitious plans for expansion including a push into the United States, where Bradley believes the same broken recruitment model presents an enormous opportunity.
“In the next few years, we want to become a dominant force across Greater Manchester and then throughout the UK,” Bradley said. “We want hundreds of thousands of users and for businesses to adopt this as a completely new way of recruiting. The US is firmly in our sights too. The problem we are solving is not unique to Britain.”
Despite the rapid early growth, Bradley knows there is still plenty of work ahead.
“We’ve come a long way in a short period of time, but we’ve got so much further to go,” he said. “Ultimately, we believe we’ve got the opportunity to make a real difference by helping businesses grow and giving professionals better opportunities, wherever they are in the world.”
Find out more about Consula here: http://Www.consula.com