Alex Hutchings and Wesley Taupin 

In early summer 2021 RecruitHub partnered with Alex Hutchings and Wesley Taupin to launch Dataworks, a specialist recruitment agency focused on the data science & engineering markets.

Alex and Wes were seeking an investment option that would give them complete control of their agency, while providing the cash to launch securely and the platform to focus fully on growth.

It’s been an explosive start, with the business exceeding expected forecasts in initial trading months, hiring rapidly and placing candidates from Europe to USA and South America.

What were the key drivers in starting your own business?

“What was important was ensuring that our business supported what we wanted to do in our lives.

For us, that was flexibility, but it was also just being our own boss.

We’d always managed ourselves and grown functions and grown teams, but fundamentally we were reporting into a business that was owned by someone else.

To anyone considering setting up, I’d say “Do it, 100% do it!”

It still blows me away that a lot of really good, solid billers don’t have the confidence in their own ability to do it on their own, or who don’t know that there are platforms out there like RecruitHub who can take away a lot of the pain, because it is very daunting.

If you’re billing any figure north of £100-150k for your current employer, I guarantee you’re going to make more money for yourself.”

What launch options did you look at and how did you choose your partner?

“We spoke to a lot of people and settled on RecruitHub because they were head and shoulders above anyone else we spoke to.

We wanted a to focus on sales – a platform that could give us all the tools and technologies so that we could plug in and start billing. We also didn’t want to align ourselves with lots of contracts and work with vendors and suppliers and negotiate rates. We just wanted to come in and turn things on and just crack on.

We had our own capital but we didn’t want to put our entire life savings into it and leverage ourselves against our houses –it was quite daunting and scary, with a family and a wife to look after.

We secured investment purely with the objective of growth – we got a couple of offers from investors and the equity deals were horrendous – we would do all the heavy lifting but our percentage share of the equity was not worth doing, especially when we’re the ones taking all the risk.

The RecruitHub platform and the investment gave us complete control, which was absolutely key. We didn’t want to be ‘managed’, because what’s the point of doing this if so?

What RecruitHub gave us was the confidence to think “wow, this is ours – right, let’s go and do it!””

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