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Need to find tech talent in Singapore? 100offer is the place to go

How 100offer wants to stand out in one of the most competitive industries in tech

100offer curates the talent on its platform, so clients are inundated with a tidal wave of irrelevant resumes

Whether it is San Francisco, Beijing or Singapore, one answer always produces the same answer.

“What is the ecosystem’s major hurdle?

“A lack of talent.”

‘Talent’ almost always refers to engineers and developers, the most valuable commodity of any startup economy.

In Singapore, the problem is especially noticeable as the local tech ecosystem works towards building a robust deep tech economy. The specific problems are as follows:

  • For employees, recruiters vary wildly in terms of quality and connections within the tech world. Plus, the good ones are restricted by bandwidth and can only handle, at most, a dozen clients at one time.

  • For employers, most job boards include as many people as possible, which means companies have to sift through a deluge of irrelevant resumes before finding someone worth an interview. And if that person stands out, its a given they have other offers from the competition.

A Shanghai-headquartered, curated talent marketplace named 100offer wants to solve these problems. The startup hopes to find and highlight the best engineers and position them to work for premiere tech companies.

This requires is curation, so if someone applies to be a candidate on 100offer there is no guarantee they will make the platform.

The startup is so hyper-focussed on engineering talent that there are jobs in the IT sector the company does not cover (infrastructure management being an example).

80 per cent [of our users] we are talking about software engineers, front end, back-end, full-stack engineers. 20 per cent we are talking about data, data scientists, data engineers plus UI/UX and product managers. We don’t really do sales, marketing or finance,” said Andy Lee, the 100offer General Manager for Singapore and Australia in a conversation with e27.

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100offer makes money like a traditional recruiting firm and charges a fee for a successful hire. This helps prevent leaking because in order to even see the candidates, the client companies need to sign a contract saying they will pay the fee.

Founded in 2014, 100offer has raised three rounds; a RMB5 million (US$760,000) seed round, a RMB20 million (US$3 million) Series A and finally a RMB25 million (US$3.8 million) Series B.

It has used that money to expand beyond China in 2016 began its international expansion. Its first international offices were in Singapore and now 100offer now also has a presence in the US and Australia.

It became profitable in China at the end of 2015 thanks in part to its client list that includes Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent and Meituan. It’s non-Chinese employers are also notable — having Grab and Garena in Singapore as well as Zendesk and insightly in the US.

A competitive sector in a competitive country

The jobs industry is quite competitive (even we at e27 have a jobs platform) and China is infamous for an insanely high-stress, high-stakes startup ecosystem.

Lee told e27 that it is the blend of personal service and technology that has helped them stand out over the competition.

“We have a team of professional talent consultants. People from recruitment background and candidates who work through the whole process through [with the consultants],” Lee explained.

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At the end of the day, recruitment is still a sales job, and the person-to-person connections is essential. Which has led to a core tenant of the company’s culture. 100offer “seeks what is best for the client”, even if that means the competition lands the job and gets the fee.

Lee pointed out that one of the problems with the recruitment industry is that if somebody has two jobs, only one is with the recruiter. This means they may down-sell the other job just to fill their post and get the fee. In this situation, the person losing out is the candidate.

Whichever road you choose is fine. We won’t be forcing [a job] down your throat,” said Lee.

So while the technology brings a certain scalability, 100offer has not completely abandoned the people-first focus that is at the heart of recruiting.

A problem of education, not competition

Every company has a particular challenge that is unique to its company. For 100offer, the startup is trying to introduce a new model in Singapore, which means coming in and doing a bit of work educating the public.

They need to prove the value of the business model, creating a pool of talent that stands out and a list of interesting clients (Grab or Garena for example) that will attract these engineers.

Once the clients start to see 100offer as the best place to find tech talent, it creates a self-perpetuating cycle the helps the platform grow.

This was the point brought up by Lee when asked about the the near future.

“I think we want to have a more established and bigger branding in the Southeast Asia tech market. When people want to look for opportunities in tech, they come to 100offer. Clients who want to look for tech talent come here,” he said.

The goal is not to rapidly expand across Southeast Asia, but rather, when the model starts to gather serious momentum, to expand into other verticals.

“We are trying to find a new way to do recruitment. If this works, we may start to look at other industries that can be disrupted as well,” said Lee.

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If Singapore’s startup economy grows into the ecosystem we all hope it will become, the industry will require a dramatic improvement in engineering talent. With deep-tech growing into a serious government focus, it is going to require the best and brightest developers, engineers and data scientists. Whether they are Singaporean, or long-term residents, they will need to live in the city.

As Singapore works to attract this kind of talent, 100offer hopes it can be the go-to job platform for the people we need to grow our startup community.

The post Need to find tech talent in Singapore? 100offer is the place to go appeared first on e27.