New recruitment programme an industry game-changer

Developed by Rahul Suchdev and Manfred Lange, HOICpro brings clients and candidates together on one platform cutting out the need for recruitment specialists. Photo / Nick Reed

A programme anticipated to change the face of the IT industry has today been launched by two New Zealand business owners.

The first of its kind, HOICpro is designed to take out the "middle man" in IT recruitment and has the potential to shave up to 30 per cent off the cost of recruitment, say its creators.

Developed by Rahul Suchdev and Manfred Lange, HOICpro brings clients (businesses looking for IT contractors or permanent staff) and candidates (IT contractors or those looking for permanent positions) together on one platform cutting out the need for recruitment companies and recruitment specialists.

"This is essentially a trading website. From a client's perspective, it tells them what capabilities are available in the market and what are the going rates for contractors. HOICpro brings the whole market to them," Suchdev said.

"For candidates, it tells them what are the ongoing projects are and what the market is looking like. At the moment they rely on recruitment agencies and vendors to [tell them] that."

HOICpro allows clients to post resource requirements, target candidates from a verified profiles directory, shortlist candidates, set up and timetable interviews, make an offer and accept a contract all online. Meanwhile, candidates can create a profile, apply for jobs and can be approached by companies for roles.

All information on the site is verified by HOICpro significantly reducing the time it would take for companies to complete background and document searches.

"In some cases [hiring a contractor] can be as fast as two minutes," Suchdev said.

The programme uses the same basic model developed by recruitment agencies but amalgamates the processes.

"You identify a need, you publish it and take it out to the market and traditionally you would go through a recruitment agency, it then gets put on job board, LinkedIn and or put out to tender," he says.

"What this system does is that it depicts all those processes so the client puts out a job, it gets sent out to everyone that is available in the system but it also uses an algorithm to match the profiles."

By bringing these processes together, HOICpro could potentially save companies millions of dollars, said Suchdev.

"By introducing HOICpro we can reduce the middle man margin up to 30 or 40 per cent. In real terms the Auckland IT market is worth about a billion dollars and if we can take away about $300 million and keep those Indian companies at bay, that money can be split between the people doing the work and the people paying for it."

Suchdev, who is the owner and co-founder of recruitment company SGS, said he co-developed the idea after he found the industry had become commercialised and thanks to a bit of prompting from his wife, Sargam.

"As a recruitment company, we used a lot of [the above] tools and we found there were a lot of shortcomings and it just wasn't fun. We needed to make a change and rather than be affected by it, we are driving the change," he said.

"I was staring at the TV one day and my wife goes, 'what's wrong' and I said, I hate LinkedIn, I hate job boards, and I hate clients who just want everything at a lower and lower rate, and I hate my job.

"My wife then said to me, 'so what is it that you can do better?' Next thing you know, I have Manfred in the room and a couple of other people, and said hey guys can we do this better?"

The duo are expecting big things from the programme following an overwhelmingly positive response from companies who were surveyed for their opinion on what HOICpro could offer.

"We have presented to about 20-odd enterprise accounts and they have turned around and said the question is not whether we should have it, it's why wouldn't we have it."