This post was written by our Co-Founder Juliet Eccleston

Right at the beginning of defining the proposition for AnyGood? I was keen to look at what worked in other industries and also what challenges they faced. Specifically Airbnb in particular was a huge influence for me. It proved that a collaborative community could be scaled and it showed the growth potential for when both a community and users want to see something succeed.

We’ve seen this within AnyGood?. Since I wrote the first post about our launch 6 months ago, our membership has grown as has our client base. We’ve seen that the drive for clients to join us has not only been to drastically improve their ROI for recruitment services, but also because they want something different. The desire for something different is a powerful one and increases the level of engagement, collaboration and the result is a different kind of relationship. It’s where people share this new way of working with colleagues and peers across the industry that traction starts to increase considerably.

The signs are consistent across industries when it’s ripe for disruption. You can see that wherever there are unnecessary limitations, intermediaries, complexities, broken trust and inefficiencies there will be someone considering how to reinvent the model. Simply targeting one area isn’t sufficient for disruption however. I’ve seen many new companies claiming to disrupt a market when in fact they’ve done a great job at making a bad process more efficient.

Maintaining focus on the key principles has been critical to us. ‘Strength in community’, ‘Reputation matters’ and ‘Access over ownership’ has helped us to avoid falling into the trap of incremental improvement. In addition, it would have been criminal to not recognise the opportunities you have when you’re building something from scratch. A great example for me is designing a process that supports underrepresented groups from day 1, enabling us to be diverse by design.

Learning from other industries doesn’t stop once the proposition is defined. We’ve had to stay curious and learn from what’s worked and what hasn’t in other industries. Whether this be looking at how to build our own team and maintain diversity of thought, how to create a positive and inclusive culture or considering how to expand and grow. For us, Airbnb continues to stay incredibly relevant, particularly as it’s impacted by unconscious bias in a similar way to recruitment. A recent study examining Airbnb users and data suggests that reputation can offset social bias. The quote below from this study could easily be referring to recruitment platforms.

“The fundamental question we wanted to answer is whether technology can be used to influence people’s perception of trust,” Abrahao from the study says. “These platforms can engineer tools that have great influence in how people perceive each other and can make markets fairer, especially to users from underrepresented minorities.”

We built AnyGood? with the fundamental principle that reputation is key to finding a great person for a role. That’s why every candidate is personally recommended by our diverse network of experts and why clients rate the quality of recommendations they receive. It’s great to see this being confirmed within a different industry and helps us to gain insights into how we too can improve and leverage this information for the benefit of members, clients and candidates.

This is just one example of how learnings within this new emergent marketplace can be relevant across industries. Our aim is to continue to think differently, to collaborate with those who see life through a slightly different lens and to never stop learning.

If you’d like to hear more about how we work, please get in touch with me directly at juliet@anygood.com