Kyle Probert 

Transparent Talent was, in some ways, destined to be. Founder Kyle Probert had spent ten years building a reputation as one of the top DevOps and SRE recruiters in the UK, but it wasn’t until multiple clients and candidates asked when he was going to launch his own firm that he began seriously contemplating it. Taking advantage of a market opportunity, he formed Transparent in 2020 and immediately began delivering talent solutions to some of the UK’s most innovative technology companies.

What motivated you to launch Transparent?

“After several leadership roles in recruitment, I wanted to get back fully hands on and be in control of my own destiny without a huge team.

I just wanted to do the job for a bit, and when you’re working from home with a strong network, you’re better off doing it for yourself.

That autonomy of controlling what you put in and what you get out is always the most enjoyable part of being an entrepreneur.

In our first full month, my client base exploded, the demand was much more than we thought, and we had a really good first full quarter and it’s just continued.

It’s also been great to be able to grow at my own pace. I really enjoyed being a one-man army for my first year, before growing out the team.

You don’t need to pursue the debt-heavy, 100-person model just because it will feel like “success”.

Success is really all about being proud of what you’re doing.”

How did you decide on who to partner with to launch the business?

“My advice to anyone considering launch would be “don’t go completely alone – whichever platform or partnership you’re considering, use one of them.”

I looked at 3 or 4 different platform options, and the cost versus the level of support offered by Recruit was much more balanced than any other of the offerings I looked at, alongside the counsel.

When I met the team I realised there are actually people you can ask for support, who have knowledge to share.

A lot of the other solutions are very weighted to a “prove yourself and then become autonomous” model – they take a huge chunk of the business up front, and RecruitHub obviously doesn’t take that approach.

On the platform side, every bit of technology that I use from the RecruitHub platform is invaluable. As a founder you’re one person trying to do 5 jobs, the technology takes care of at least two of those!

The platform meant I was able to focus on sales and building revenue from day one.

I didn’t have to think about anything else.

Once I’d got the branding out of the way, which was very important to me, there was very little left.

Sign a couple of bits of paper, log into the CRM, and then go talk to people!”

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