You have probably applied to companies for an internship or work-study program. We all know the recruitment process with the traditional CV and cover letter. What if everything changed? This is the bet taken by Hesli, a startup created by Martin and Julian, two NEOMA students. Martin tells us more about this project.
The journey of the founder of Hesli
What is your background?
After high school, I swore to myself that I would never go to business school, but only fools don’t change their minds. Being very good at economics, I joined the Sorbonne and the nightmare began. Neither university nor economics were made for me. I repeated my first and second year and, having few courses, I became interested in entrepreneurship. I started as a delivery boy for Take It Easy. Then I was a cook for Menu Next Door, a Belgian startup. It was with them that I discovered The Familya great incubator that gave me a taste for entrepreneurship. I embarked on an entrepreneurial adventure by creating a business drop shipping. I was selling supporter accessories for Euro 2016. An interesting experience, but inconclusive: I made two sales.
In my third year, I stepped out of my comfort zone by going on exchange to Madrid. I then realized that business schools were the perfect place to realize my passion. I took the AST exams to integrate NEOMA Reims in L3. I found my happiness in Enactus, NEOMA’s social entrepreneurship association, but also and above all in Genius, the entrepreneurship association that I chaired for a year.
When did you get into entrepreneurship?
I did an internship at Startup Factory Brussels, a startup studio in Belgium. They saw that I was motivated and told me about their Dark Kitchen project. I was interested and I went for it! We have become the best restaurant in Poke Bowl from Brussels on Deliveroo. They offered me to stay and I really wanted to, but I decided to return to France to finish my studies. A head full of stars and a strong desire to go further in entrepreneurship.
So I brought Julian and Gabriel on board the PicMe project. This startup was supposed to allow tourists to return with beautiful memories. Everything was going well, we were incubated within the school incubator, then at Innovact, the incubator for the Grand Est region. But COVID happened and forced us to review our model. We did B2B selling photos for agencies and restaurants, but it wasn’t stimulating. We therefore became interested in the issue of internships and work-study programs.
Hesli’s beginnings
Is that where you started Hesli?
At PicMe, when we put an internship offer online, we received an average of 150 applications. We had a lot of CVs and cover letters to process. We said to ourselves that this time could be better used to deal with the profiles that best met our needs. The idea is that the CV and cover letter are outdated. A recruiter’s real need is to know who their candidate is and what they can bring to their company.
With Julian, we created Hesli. It is a platform that offers two interesting features:
- A reverse recruitment process. It is no longer the candidates who go to the recruiter, but the recruiters who search our site for the profiles that interest them. This allows them to save a lot of time.
- The possibility of being able to dig into the candidates. We have created a very complete dashboard where candidates can enter practical information, their experiences, their soft skills in the form of visual representation, videos, photos, quotes, etc.
Where are you in the development of Hesli?
We worked on a first beta with 10 companies of all sizes: startups and larger companies. The idea was to have a privileged relationship with these structures to understand what interests them and improve our product.
Today, we are moving to phase 2 with 30 paying companies who pay us €250 per profile recruited. This does not correspond to our final model. Ultimately, when critical size is reached, our business model will be offered in the form of a subscription with a certain number of profiles unlockable each month.
The launch of Hesli
When will Hesli be launched?
We are currently working on our full-scale launch, to become, from September 2021, the reference for recruiting work-study students and interns. Our goal is to reach 10,000 registered at the end of the year, by having students from all backgrounds: business schools, universities, engineering schools, etc. This is what will make Hesli’s strength. We are recruiting today like we were 20 years ago and Hesli wants to shake things up.
