Why I started SplitHire

Just incase you're interested.

May 05, 2025

My parents worked incredibly hard to ensure I had everything I needed growing up. My Dad came to the UK from Mauritius when he was 18 with nothing, my Mum was born here in the UK but also came from a family who did the best they could with what they had. They both worked as nurses for their whole career.

Since leaving University (which my parents didn’t get the privilege of attending either) I have spent what feels like my entire career working to justify why I’m good at what I do (grow companies fast) without being paid very well to do it. Now that I’m approaching my thirties fast and that I’m learning a bit more about how the world works, I’m trying to give something back by creating a brand new way of making recruitment work and therefore, hopefully, helping other people while also helping myself at the same time. So far it’s a ton of hours with no money coming in but the team and I are fully confident we’ll get there.

Going into a recession (as I believe we are at the moment) it should be crystal clear that companies are going to reduce hiring to save on costs, they’re going to keep letting people go and the community of people outside of work is going to keep growing. A few days after we started the company this article popped up stating that recruitment agencies are closing faster than ever before. I’m not surprised and I’m disappointed on behalf of all the recruiters who are now going to lose their jobs and consequently all the candidates who will no longer be supported by those professionals. Demand on remaining agencies will keep going up, and unless they’re an exception to the norm the candidate experience will keep getting worse.

SplitHire is run in an incredibly lean way meaning that the company (aside from being taken out by a company which wants to stop us doing what we’re doing because it impacts their ability to make money) will survive pretty much anything. If I’m no longer here it would still keep going. I’m not the unique selling point. I also don’t think I have the full answer on how we could do this for a lot less than most of the industry. I have part of the answer but the first years of working on this will help us build up that picture. There are three core reasons why we exist, in order of comedic value:

1. Every employer I have had has annoyed me in some way through their decision making so I needed to start working for myself.

2. Recruiters and Recruitment has such a bad reputation that by simply building one with the full intention of building a good reputation is a unique approach.

3. Like everyone we’re helping, the team behind SplitHire would like to earn a living by doing something fundamentally good.

This week I used AI to create a podcast explaining what we do, it’s a tool called Google NotebookLM. I’m sending this to my friends so that they can have a listen while doing something else but I’ll include it here. Warning - I had some feedback that 12 minutes is a bit of a slog to get through. How damaged is our attention span if that is the case? Anyway, here it is.