A decade of cross-market data, and a stubborn belief in potential.

We started in 2014 as GetMyFirstJob, one of the UK’s first early-careers platforms for young people leaving school. Twelve years on, that bet has become a multi-product platform, a practitioner team, and a body of evidence covering 1.1 million candidates. The brief hasn’t changed: find potential where it’s actually formed, not where it’s easiest to spot.

Early careers hiring still selects on prior advantage. We think it can do better.

The average graduate vacancy gets 140 CVs. Most of them measure past advantage, not future potential.

Twelve years ago, the founding observation was simple. The polished CV is rarely the strongest signal of future performance. It’s a signal of who has been supported well: the parents who edited the personal statement, the family connection that opened the internship, the school that ran a careers programme worth attending. None of that is the candidate’s fault, and none of it tells you what they’ll actually do at work.

That’s the system we’ve been building, one product at a time. It’s also, incidentally, how you find potential everywhere: first-generation candidates, apprentices, school-leavers, people whose CV doesn’t quite scan but whose work, when you look at it, clearly does.

Twelve years, six product launches, one mission.

2014

Founded

Launched as GetMyFirstJob with backing from Nesta, City & Guilds and UnLtd. Social enterprise from day one. The first market we served was young people, not employers.

The structural problem kept recurring: large employers with powerful brands attracting candidates who arrived expecting one world and found another. Early disengagement. Cohorts that underperformed against their own selection scores. The CVs had been fine. What hadn’t been read was the gap between what candidates imagined the job to be and what it actually was. That wasn’t a candidate problem. It was a structural one.

01st

Year

2017

First 100k candidates

The candidate side scaled. We started seeing both sides of the picture: what young people actually want versus what employers think they want. The gap was bigger than expected.

100k

Candidates

2019

Talent Portal launches

Our first piece of employer-facing software: a headhunt-model ATS for early careers. Search candidates by declared interest rather than waiting for CVs to arrive. Product-market fit was instant.

1st

Product

2022

Immersive Work Experience

Branded virtual work experience launches with Channel 4. Designed to capture behavioural signal at the point engagement is highest, between ages 14 and 18, before applications are written.

14+

Age

2024

Assessment Platform released

The piece that made the journey connected: Talent Assess converts engagement evidence into ranked, validated, defensible shortlists. Independently benchmarked at r = 0.42 against first-year performance. The same year, our partnership with Channel 4 won the ISE Outstanding Employer & Supplier Recruitment Partnership Award — and our work with Schneider Electric was nominated for the same award in 2025.

r=.42

Validity

2026

Today

Six platform products covering the full early careers journey. Used by 110,000 UK employers across seven sectors. Still a social enterprise; still unreasonably interested in fairness.

2.4M

Applications

What we believe

Three ideas we’ve never compromised on.

These aren’t values statements. They’re the intellectual positions that determine every product decision we make.

Motivation over attainment

The polished CV signals who was well-supported, not what someone will do at work. Screening on grades and prior internships is, in effect, screening on the quality of the support network behind the candidate. The signal worth chasing is forward-looking: declared interest, behavioural engagement, what someone sticks at when no one is watching.

Understanding before intent

Most selection asks candidates to declare interest before they have any real basis for it. Those who guess correctly are the ones already embedded in that world. Immersive Work Experience closes that gap by giving candidates genuine exposure before an application is written. Interest that follows real engagement means something; interest that precedes it is mostly noise.

Friction selects for advantage

Every additional application step is a filter that motivated candidates clear and advantaged ones skate past. The candidate who drops out at step six wasn’t less motivated—they correctly calculated that the process didn’t respect their time. Talent Assess is built on removing friction while increasing signal quality. More steps do not find better candidates. They find more patient ones.

110,000 employers. 1.1 million young people. One platform.

The numbers are useful because they’re the dataset every product is benchmarked against. Validity scores, adverse-impact thresholds and time-to-shortlist are all calibrated against what 2.4 million real applications actually did.

Twelve years as a social enterprise has given us something that takes time to build: a picture of early talent that reflects the whole market, not just the parts that are easiest to reach. The 2.4 million applications behind our benchmarks span seven sectors and every route into work, from school leavers to career changers. That breadth is what makes our validity scores, adverse-impact thresholds and engagement benchmarks reliable. When you use our platform, the evidence you are working from has been tested against what actually happened, at scale, across a decade.

See our impact Meet the team

Employers on platform

110k

UK employers have used Talent People products since 2014.

Candidate registrations

1.1M

Young people registered through our platforms to date.

Applications handled

2.4M

Applications processed with cross-market behavioural data.

Sectors served

From financial services to utilities, with sector-specific competency models.

Structure, not positioning

What being a social enterprise actually means.

Lots of companies describe themselves as purpose-driven. The legal and governance structure of a certified social enterprise is different in kind, not degree.

Social Enterprise UK certified. Independently verified against the national standard. Not self-declared.
Nesta holds the largest external shareholding and sits on our board as an active participant—not a passive investor.
Surplus is reinvested. There is no dividend distribution. Profit goes back into platform development and social impact programmes.
City & Guilds and UnLtd are co-investors in the mission. Their involvement is strategic, not financial in the conventional sense.

This structure is what allows us to make product decisions that prioritise fairness over speed-to-shortlist—and to publish our methodology openly rather than treating it as a competitive moat.

Backed, endorsed & partnered with

The next decade is about fairness at scale.

The hard problem now is not finding signal. We have plenty of that. It’s making sure the signal is used fairly, explainably and consistently across very different sectors. That’s where most of our research, product and engineering attention is going.

If this is the debate you’re already in, the Roundtable is where it happens. 1,250 early careers professionals, peer-only, no vendor pitches—just the people running these programmes comparing what’s working and what isn’t.

Join the Roundtable Read our research