- TribeHired is a Malaysian talent recruitment platform that focuses on getting companies to bid for talents in the ICT sector as opposed to talents chasing jobs.
- They recently received RM1.8 million in funding from AngelCentral, and this coincides with their plans to grow their presence in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.
- One of their new developments is a platform that helps more experienced tech developers get freelance job opportunities with companies around the region.
Recently hitting another milestone, local IT and tech talent marketplace TribeHired (which we covered in 2015) announced their success in securing funding worth RM1.8 million through AngelCentral, an angel investor network spearheaded by the founders of Singaporean job platform JobsCentral.
All of this comes at a period in time following their expansions into markets such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Singapore, which they managed to pull off self-funded after a hugely profitable year in 2016 thanks to the commercial success of their platform.
Recently, however, TribeHired decided to seek out financial assistance and industry leverage from connected players in the industry in order to take their platform to the next level.
“We wanted to scale the freelance marketplace rapidly and it needed a sizeable investment along with industry links,” said Ajay Singh Sangwan, co-founder of TribeHired. “In AngelCentral, we found a perfect partner as it had the founders of JobCentral on board.”
Avenues For The Experienced
One huge development by TribeHired in line with this funding is a new freelance marketplace that currently focuses on helping more experienced tech developers (the top 15% of developers in the market) connect with employers and work remotely as freelancers.
“The vision is to make the digital nomad dream come true for tech freelancers across Southeast Asia and allow them to work remotely with some of the best tech employers in the region,” Ajay said.
“What employers love about the model is the proximity to top talents available locally and the ‘TribeHired quality service’ that comes along with it.”
The marketplace functions similarly to their current full-time job platform, with exception of pricing differences, and TribeHired have integrated both platforms into a one-stop solution to providing employers easy hiring solutions based on their recruitment needs.
On from six months of operations, the new freelancer marketplace has already allowed IT talents to follow the increasingly popular trend of professionals choosing to go the freelance/contract route and pursue the projects of their choosing.
This all adds up to them also being able to enjoy a better semblance of work-life balance, and in one case an individual was able to attend to family health issues while still working as a remote freelancer.
“TribeHired always had the vision in its next phase to focus on the digital nomad culture, or basically allowing people to work remotely and providing employers an easy-to-use global marketplace,” Ajay said. “We’d been experimenting with this idea for almost two years, and 2018 seemed a perfect time for us as we had established our full-time marketplace firmly across the Southeast Asia region.”
“We always knew we’d do it and that it’d work, so it was more about timing and doing it the right way.”
From Strength To Strength
As of 2018, TribeHired are currently on a roll of averaging 2 job placements a day with companies such as Grab, Astro, Fave, and Media Prima among the employers in tow. This equates to an average of over 60 individuals being hired a month, but according to Ajay, this isn’t yet the end game.
“It would be something of a miracle if in one city and in one industry we can scale the job placements per month to 100, with the product as our MVP rather than having to hire hundreds of recruiters.”
“Within the Klang Valley, over 75% of tech based startups, SMEs, and MNCs are using our platform, but by 2019, we have the goal to make it above 90%,” Ajay continued.
“Unlike other platforms, we’re the only hiring platform that measures hires, interviews, and offers on our system instead of how many companies posted a job—we’re focused on the end goal of job placements.”
Ajay also went on to note that TribeHire’s success is also representative of their success in getting the market to accept a job platform that got companies to compete for talent and not the other way around.
“A lot of people didn’t understand how companies competing for talent would work,” he said. “But that’s a thing of the past now as we’ve made hiring possible in one week because of our innovative marketplace solutions.”
Moving forward, the aim of TribeHired is to prove their platform as a model that can do away with the traditional method of going through recruiters for employment.
“Our focus now is more on local expansions within the cities we operate in to capture a bigger market pie,” Ajay said. “We want to achieve this with a self-running product-based business model.”
“There are a lot of recruiting agencies and big guns that have thousands of recruiters globally, and we want to show the industry that we can do the same with 80% less effort.”
- To know more about TribeHired and their new marketplace, visit their official website or Facebook page.
Feature Image Credit: TribeHired
