Reed.co.uk is launching a marketplace that will connect direct employers with specialist agencies within their areas.

Called Reed.co.uk Exchange, it will launch on 9 October and be accessed in the recruiter services section of the website behind the homepage.

Martin Warnes, Reed.co.uk managing director, told Recruiter that the Exchange will focus on a number of key segments for its initial launch, including accounting, engineering, IT and healthcare. “We’ll be inviting a number of agencies who are existing customers to join Exchange and they will feed back to us about how it works,” he said.

To maintain quality of service, Warnes said: “During its launch phase, membership of the REC [Recruitment & Employment Confederation] and existing usage of reed.co.uk will be pre-requisites for entry.”

It works by employers posting a vacancy anonymously and agencies pitching to work on it. Employers choose which agency/ies they want to work with and agree a fee. Agencies can then send CVs via the website and after a successful placement is made and start date set the employer pays the agency an agreed fee.

Exchange works on a similar model to other marketplaces such as TalentPuzzle in the UK and Bountyjobs in the US. Warnes says its uniqueness lies in the fact that Reed.co.uk will be introducing the service to its existing audience of 5,000 recruitment agencies and 10,000 direct employers. “So we’re launching it into a very vibrant market from day one,” he said. The marketplace will run separately from the job board and CV database searching service but will complement the overall Reed.co.uk offering to employers and recruiters. Warnes said it was clear from discussions with direct employers that there was still a big appetite for using specialist recruitment agencies and it wanted to find a way of fostering this. “That is the ethos behind it. All of our product development is driven by our users,” he said. Exchange has been the subject of a number of focus groups.

While the marketplace model has proven itself to be a cost-effective way to recruit, Warnes stressed that Exchange is less about helping employers drive down costs and more about finding and matching the best candidate for the role. “Employers coming to Reed.co.uk at the moment can advertise on the website and access a CV database with the biggest pool of active CV databases in the land. What Exchange does is lets the same direct employers access new talent pools that exist in local specialist recruitment agencies,” he said. “It’s the combination of entry points into Reed.co.uk that excites us.”

Exchange is free to use, with Reed.co.uk’s revenue coming from a small percentage of the agency’s placement fee. To help decide which agencies are likely to do the best job, feedback and performance statistics are provided by the site, along with any example CVs. Employers can rate each agency it works with. Everything in Exchange is done online, including negotiation of the agency fee. To avoid being called by agencies, the names and contact information of employers are hidden and not provided to the agency until an employee chooses to use them (even then the telephone can be kept private).

Warnes says that Exchange marks a departure for Reed.co.uk as a typical job board but believes the industry needs new models. “The recruitment landscape is becoming ever more complex with a wide range of options for advertising and a lot of noise for jobseekers and employers to navigate through,” he said. “Anyone in the job board space has to evolve and take into account technology as well as the demands of the employers and the need to deliver the right candidate faster.

“How Reed.co.uk will stand out is through product development. In the last year we have made investment in hiring more programmers and designers. The product development team is much bigger than it was 12 months ago and we very much want that to be reflected in the quality of service we offer. It will also be articulated in a number of new products over the coming 12 months.”

www.reed.co.uk