Next Roundtable · Thu 14 May · "Managing Candidate Overload"
About · Our story & people

We’re rebuilding early careers because the status quo fails too many.

A social enterprise founded in 2014 with the support of Nesta, City & Guilds and UnLtd. A multi-disciplinary team of business psychologists, engagement specialists and platform designers — with a decade of cross-market data from 110,000 employers and 1.1 million young people.

Manifesto

Potential is everywhere. The challenge is how we find it.

Early talent recruitment is broken in a specific, fixable way: it selects for prior advantage rather than future potential. The young person with the polished CV, the personal statement edited by a relative, the internship secured through a family connection — they’re not always the highest-potential candidate in the pipeline. They’re just the best-supported one.

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

Candidates now use AI to write applications. Employers use AI to screen them. Screening volume goes up, signal quality goes down, and everyone loses confidence in the decision at the end. Adding more screening is not the answer.

The answer is to capture genuine behavioural evidence before an application is ever submitted — and to make selection decisions based on what candidates actually did, not what they (or an LLM) claim.

That’s what we’ve spent ten years building. It’s also, incidentally, how you find potential everywhere.

Our story

A decade of two-sided data.

2014

Founded

Launched as GetMyFirstJob with Nesta, City & Guilds and UnLtd backing. Social enterprise from day one.

01st
Year
2017

First 100k candidates

Cross-market data collection begins. Two-sided view of what candidates want and what employers need.

100k
Candidates
2019

TalentPortal launches

Our first piece of employer-facing software: a headhunting-model ATS, built for early careers.

1st
Product
2022

Immersive Work Experience

IWX launches with Channel 4 & DHL. Branded, AI-graded virtual work experience for age 14+.

14+
Age
2024

TalentAssess released

Behavioural evidence becomes a shortlist. Business psychologists meet purpose-built software.

r=.42
Validity
2026

Today

110k employers, 1.1M candidates, 2.4M applications. Six platform products, full-journey coverage.

2.4M
Applications
Read the full story
Values

Four commitments, non-negotiable.

These aren’t posters. They’re the tests we apply when deciding what to build, who to hire, and which clients to work with.
§ 01

Evidence over intuition

Every claim we make — about candidates, about products, about ourselves — is traceable to data. No vibes-based recruitment.

§ 02

Fair by design

Adverse impact isn’t a post-hoc report; it’s built into the product. If our tools make it harder to be fair, they’ve failed.

§ 03

Long over short

We measure 24-month retention, not first-month offer acceptance. Good hires compound; bad ones do, too.

§ 04

Both sides of the market

We answer to employers who pay us, and to the young people whose careers we touch. Neither wins if the other loses.

Our team

Business psychologists, platform designers, engagement specialists.

Not an account-management layer on top of a platform. A multi-disciplinary team of 64 across London, Manchester and Bristol — with practitioners on every engagement.
Founder

David Allison, PhD

Founder & CEO

Organisational psychologist. Built GetMyFirstJob into The Talent People over a decade. Trustee of two education charities.

Executive

Priya Sharma

Chief Product Officer

Led product at Workday UK, Eploy and Personio. Champions the candidate side of every feature decision.

Science

Dr. Ada Olatunji

Head of Assessment Science

Chartered business psychologist. Built the predictive validity and adverse-impact methodology underpinning TalentAssess.

Engagement

Tom Reeves

Director, Schools & Early Engagement

Former Head of Outreach at a UK Russell Group university. Leads our school programmes across 800+ UK schools.

Meet the rest of the team · 60 more
Our impact

Impact is a number, not a narrative.

Theory of Change model co-developed with Nesta in 2014. Published annually. Externally assured by Social Enterprise UK — no marketing math.

Young people reached
1.1M
Registered through our platforms since 2014.
First-gen hires
42%
Of hires through the Assessment Platform are first-in-family to enter that sector.
Free schools programmes
800+
UK schools reached by subsidised engagement programmes.
Gift Aid equivalent
£3.2M
Reinvested in candidate-side programmes and bursaries in 2025.

Backed, endorsed & partnered with

Nesta City & Guilds UnLtd Social Enterprise UK Institute of Student Employers Crown Commercial Service