Richard Tyrie, founder of the recruitment network Jobsgopublic (JGP)

Richard Tyrie is a social entrepreneur who founded the recruitment network Jobsgopublic (JGP). He talks to Ben Stevens about redefining the employment landscape in the public sector

“We’re seeking to transform the way the public and not-for-profit sectors operate, by helping them to apply supply chain principles to the management of talent,” says Richard Tyrie, director and co-founder of JGP, the UK’s leading provider of web-based talent management technology to the public sector.

“Most organisations claim that people are their most important asset but fall short of the mark when it comes to managing their skills base. We’re giving them web-based tools and support to enable them to change that — either individually or with other employers.”

Born in Rochford in Essex, Tyrie left school at 16 and spent several years travelling in Europe, North America and Asia before returning to the UK to work in the executive recruitment industry. His extensive experience in recruitment, combined with his desire to apply his skills to the public sector, led him to set up jobsgopublic.com, an online recruitment network, which now has 600,000 visitors per month and attracts a diverse, web-literate audience.

Through jobsgopublic.com, Tyrie works in close partnership with the Local Governments Improvement and Development Agency to provide LGjobs.com, to help local authorities deal with the impending recruitment problem — namely that a third of the public sector workforce is set to retire in 10 years’ time but only 6% of the workforce is aged under 25, a figure that falls to 1.6% in London.

This network operates in conjunction with JGP’s Talent Pools, which enable employers to apply the supply chain principles to the recruitment process by profiling and recycling potential candidates to ensure that good, but unsuccessful, talent is retained for alternative job opportunities. This type of pool is now being used by a number of public and voluntary sector partners.

Another JGP capability is a new form of online marketplace called Slivers of Time, which is currently being piloted in the London borough of Newham. In a direct response to the government’s target of moving one million people off incapacity benefit in the next few years, the system enables employers to use the skills of those people who can only work limited or varying hours — which, in turn, gives the long-term unemployed a means of getting back on the job ladder, one step at a time.

Richard Tyrie is married with a four-year-old daughter, Grace, and lives in south-east London.

What prompted you to set up JGP?
It all began in 1996; I had been involved in recruitment for a couple of years, headhunting lawyers for City law firms after a spell of travelling. I visited an internet café for the first time ever to conduct some research and had what can only be described as a Damascene conversion: I was profoundly struck by the potential of the internet to turn recruitment on its head. That day I resigned from my job, without much of a clue what I would do next but with a firm belief in the ability of the web to change this sort of interaction in the future. Within a week, I had joined taps.com, which had launched the year before as the first career site in the UK.

Two years on, with my then boss, David Marshall, I set up JGP to focus on the public sector. We wanted to create a sustainable business that would save money in the recruitment process and feed it back into the public purse, benefiting public sector workers and, ultimately, the communities they serve. Definitely worth getting out of bed for, we thought.

How would you describe your company’s values?
A friend of mine recently said “JGP are convincing people to build the Panama Canal when they’ve only just discovered the world isn’t flat” and I think that sums us up. We’ve always created new markets by working with a limited number of ‘believers’ and we’ve had to demonstrate complete honesty and integrity in order for the relationship to work. Generating profit is not the be all and end all; it is being the first to effect change that drives us — the financial rewards are merely a bi-product.

JGP survived the dot-com bubble. What do you put its resilience and success down to?
We were first to market in 1998 and had a clear run at the public sector for many years, which helped.

It’s also about being extremely agile and iterative towards strategy, resourcing and the management of projects; we simply can’t and won’t plan five years ahead, so we focus on the short to medium term. To develop strategy, we have a ‘JGP labs’ process so that ideas from across the company or client base can be evaluated systematically. If given the go-ahead, projects can be developed and rolled-out to market for piloting in a matter of weeks.

The labs process enables us to accurately predict what is going to work well with users online and what will have appeal to clients; this hugely reduces risk, yet a number of dot-com companies didn’t and still don’t think like this.

Your approach has been very successful in the public sector, but how do you see it translating to the private sector?
Very well. We’re increasingly focusing our attention on tackling worklessness in the community, and the private sector plays a key role in this. As the private sector forms a large part of the ‘demand’ element of the supply chain, we need to enlarge it if we are to offer the necessary choice and flexibility of opportunities to get people back to work. The early signs are very encouraging.

How do you foresee JGP evolving over the next five years?
We will continue to focus on helping employers collaborate with each other locally and we’ll also see social networks becoming more prevalent for employment purposes.

If, say, I’m considering becoming a social worker, I don’t just want to see an employers’ career brochure. I’d rather find out what social workers really think about their work: “what’s the working environment like?”; “what do you love/hate about your job?”; “how was the interview process and training?”

If we can help employers better articulate the reality of working at an organisation through a conversation with their existing employees, it can only serve to attract better informed, more ‘fit for purpose’ talent. Naturally there are pros and cons to this approach but openness and honesty must be beneficial in the long run.
Finally we’ll see the emergence of referrals as a means of attracting the best performers; talented people tend to know other talented people.

IN BRIEF

Career: Researcher and executive search consultant (internet/intellectual property law specialist), Humana International Group plc (1995-1996); business development manager, taps.com (1996-1998); founder and director, Jobsgopublic Ltd (1998-present)

Most valuable piece of technology: The silicon chip — for its ubiquitous presence in my favourite devices

Most useful website: Google, for the quantum leap in search results accuracy and efficacy. It shrank the internet overnight

Least useful website: Jobcentreplus.gov.uk. Despite being one of the most visited careers websites in Europe, and with arguably the most potential to transform people’s lives, it fails to offer both sets of users even the most rudimentary functionality

Thing you wish you’d known 10 years ago: That it’s about enjoying the journey — the destination won’t be appearing for quite some time.