Earlier this year I wrote about Breaz.io, an auction-house for Tech talent. Starting this past Summer, Breaz began hand-selecting 10 programmers/developers/graphic designers/sysAdmin’s – tech talent – and putting them up on the auction block for companies to bid for – those companies include Tinyclues, Algolia, PeopleDoc, Prestashop, and many more. On average candidates find employment just 2 weeks after the process starts. 144 candidates have gone to first interviews with some of the 110 companies that have to date been accepted on Breaz (Breaz qualifies all recruiter requests). The average salary: 48,000€.
For companies, the model is quite simple. Instead of paying traditional headhunters a flat percentage (something like 15-25% of the annual salary, after the ‘trial period’ is over, typically 3 months), Breaz takes a monthly payment of roughly .8% of annual salary over 18 months – or roughly 14.4% of annual salary. While the difference might not seem staggering, their largest selling point comes from the fact that monthly payments stop the moment the talent stops working for the company, whether in month 1 or month 17. This means that, in addition to having a model aligned with users (i.e: startups), this also allows younger companies to use Breaz, accruing a monthly burn rate similar to the other SaaS services they are used to managing.
Breaz.io have now opened their marketplace up to Interns, meaning that tech companies can pick up tech interns at the same place they are getting full-time talent – the best part is, it’s Free. For Breaz, it means getting great talent using Breaz early on, and it means that smaller startups will be able to to use the service as well.
Breaz represents a signficant alternative to the existing headhunting model. Currently, recruitment happens one of two ways : a job board (paid or otherwise) / a jobs listing on a company website, or a paid headhunter. Breaz sits somewhere in between – curating the talent and then allowing companies to do the interviewing/woo-ing.