Finding the best talent for your tech company has no price – in fact, some tech companies are willing to bid against each other in order to get the right talent. For the past few months, tech companies in Paris (and, increasingly, London & Berlin) have been receiving weekly curated lists of tech talent on a new service, Breaz.io (on RudeList), where they can examine the talent profile, compose on offer and send it to them. Those offers come with a description of the company, the post, as well as the salary range, and talent – ranging from product designers to full stack engineers – can choose to except to refuse each offer, in the hopes of receiving a hirer offer.
The concept has attracted likes of Blablacar, Tinyclues, Prestashop & dozens others, who are making several offers per week, according to co-founder Corentin Guillemard, formely head of PayMill France (he left the company earlier this year, taking fellow Paymill employee Jean-Loup Karst with him). Guillemard says that last week alone, the 10 talents were offered more than €1 Million, meaning that each talent is receiving on average two offers of more than €50K (a decent salary in France).
Guillemard wasn’t shy about pointing out that the idea was inspired heavily by Hired, a Silicon Valley startup with the same model; however, where Breaz differs is their desire to change recruitment from a ‘headhunting fee’ model (getting paid a percentage of total annual salary upon recruitment), to a SaaS model. With Breaz, companies pay a monthly fee for each talent recruited on Breaz – the monthly cost lasts 18 months, and, should the employee leave before then, Breaz is no longer paid the monthly fee. In essence, Breaz aligns with its employers’ retention motivations – in addition, the burden of recruiting is spread out over multiple months.
Breaz is currently offering a €500 referral bonus for any user that invites tech talent to the platform which ultimately gets hired. The company is eye-ing the European market aggressively and hopes to solidify their position in Europe before Hired starts looking to Europe.