Bulgarian Noble has Raised €250K to Bring the Talent Wars in the Blockchain Dimension
Georgi Ivanov came up with an idea to fix the broken hiring process while he was still a CEO of Enhancv, another HR startup. The company was guiding people to fine-tune their resumes so they highlight their attitude and personality better and to get recognized by the right employer. However, his attention was drawn to a completely different problem – companies cannot communicate properly why people should choose them. Soon he went away from his first company to start a new venture called Noble. Noble is a marketplace that brings together advanced company profiling, professional communities, and referrals and has raised €250K to experiment with the concept.
Tо attract and retain talent today could turn into a sneaky and inefficient process. Often enough companies prefer to outsource it to external recruiting agencies, which Ivanov sees as an issue. “This takes a lot of time, and the results are not optimal”, he explained Trending Topics. In short, the second component of Noble is to make the community refer people for positions, reward them for this and put the referrals on blockchain so it is clear no one is cheating.
But how it actually works
“Unlike the standard job boards we don’t provide ads only, but a better description of the company, your potential project, the people you might end up be managed by, the company’s culture, values etc.”, Ivanov explains the enhancement of the profiling. The idea is that the candidates get the feeling they have already been in the company, he added.
Similar to other job marketplaces Noble’s service is free for everyone, up until a certain moment. The model is pay-per-hire. In other words as soon as a company hires someone a sum equivalent to two monthly gross wages of the new employee is automatically blocked from the employers account and stored for three months. If the employee is still in the company three months later, Noble gets the commission and distributes 80% of it to the first three referrers. So everyone should be happy. Ivanov assured us that the blockchain technology prevents referrers from recommending the same candidate every time the three months in a company are over. Noble also promises to decrease the time for finding the right person for senior positions from approximately three months to two-three weeks which might also cut the costs significantly. However, lowering the cost is not the priority, the founders explained.
Recently blockchain has often been used to eliminate middlemen which in this case would be the recruitment agencies. Noble, however, is still trying to find a formula to collaborate with the agencies instead of leaving them out of the game.
So far, Noble has two pilot clients from the local tech sector – the data processing company Experian and the hosting provider Siteground. “For the first two weeks we’ve sourced more than ten talents for Experian, which are currently in the interviewing process. I’ll be able to share the actual effectiveness of our method in the beginning 2019, but definitely so far so good – people are referring a lot”, Ivanov explained.
Start small, dream big
Ivanov’s venture has barely built its minimal viable product and has already attracted its first investors – aeternity Ventures has backed the project with €50K this summer, and Eleven Ventures has put another €200K at a six digit valuation. To close the investment round required to build the platform Noble needs another €350K. And this is not the end. The founders have also planned a security token offering (STO) to further fundraise and go out of the local market.
“Our vision is to make Noble the place to go when looking for talent or job on a global scale”, he explained. Now, the job boards typically have the problem of being too local and hardly scalable. There are successful examples like the US Indeed that has been around for over a decade. According to its Davide Novelli, Director of International Online Operations, the secret of the global success in this business is that Indeed is building local teams and tailoring the platform to local market needs everywhere they go. So it might be a challenge and a great marketing investment for the young Noble and its team of 12 to penetrate different markets and scale the business. “I’m confident that our concept would allow us to be relevant even in geographies when only one company uses our platform to recruit talent. It is because the better employer branding, advanced job ad format and referral mechanics could do the job even without having an additional external network, besides the one the company already has”, Ivanov said.
By now, the question whether blockchain is the universal solution for cutting off middlemen, maximizing efficiency while optimizing costs in any sector, including HR remains unanswered. Noble’s plans sound close to too ambitious, but the core team consists of rather experienced founders who have been around in the ecosystem failing and succeeding since its very beginning, which makes it all more plausible.
