Mark Chaffey and the Applicant Who Never Applied

Mark Chaffey's company began with a reversal. In the ordinary hiring market, people chase jobs. In hackajob's version, employers had to make the first move. A developer could consider the approach, inspect the role and say yes or no. This tiny redistribution of manners became a business: the suitor, for once, was the corporation.

The idea arrived in 2014, when Chaffey and Razvan Creanga were students at King's College London. Creanga had seen the awkwardness of technical recruitment while working around startups. He wanted a process led by evidence of skill rather than the familiar pageant of agencies and polished CVs. Chaffey, then studying Business and Management, joined him. Hackajob dates its origin to a King's cafeteria, an appropriately unceremonious birthplace for a company devoted to removing ceremony from hiring.

They raised a small angel round from an investor who had backed one of Creanga's earlier ventures. Chaffey became chief operating officer. The early product used coding challenges and assessments to establish what candidates could do. It later developed into a reverse marketplace with a private talent pool, employer pages and matching software. The mechanism changed. The suspicion beneath it did not: a CV is a surprisingly poor container for a person.

Chapter oneA company grows up with its founder

Chaffey was 20 when hackajob started. In one podcast introduction years later, he observed that he had spent every waking moment of his twenties thinking about technical recruitment. It sounds both impressive and faintly alarming, like training for a very administrative Olympics. Yet the narrowness became useful. A founder who remains with one problem long enough gets to watch the problem change its clothes.

By 2018, hackajob had raised a £5 million Series A. The following year Chaffey moved from COO to CEO, while Creanga eventually became chairman and later an adviser. Customers grew to include large organizations such as Sainsbury's, Vodafone and the BBC, companies whose need for engineers was easy to underestimate because they did not present themselves as software businesses. Chaffey's recurring point was that digital transformation had made technical talent everybody's concern. The supermarket and the bank were now competing with the startup for the same scarce people.

Then offices closed. Chaffey has described the pandemic as an extraordinary leadership test, one he relished. Hackajob shifted to remote-first work and altered its proposition for remote hiring. In 2021 he said revenue had more than tripled over the preceding 12 months. The marketplace was no longer a university experiment. It was an enterprise platform trying to cover employer branding, sourcing, assessment and interviews.

“People are best at the skills that require critical thinking, empathy and creativity.”Mark Chaffey on what automation should leave to humans

This is the useful tension in Chaffey's thinking. He sells automation, but speaks most clearly about the parts that resist it. Low-code tools, copilots and generative models, in his view, should carry the repetitive work so people can concentrate on judgment and connection. In hiring, he argues, AI can flag complementary skills or biased language. The final decision remains human. It is a less cinematic future than robots hiring robots, and considerably more employable.

Seventy-eight conversationsThe difficult round

The company's largest financing arrived at an awkward moment. In early 2023, technology layoffs were constant and global venture funding had fallen sharply. A hiring platform seeking a Series B had all the atmospheric advantages of a picnic in sleet. Chaffey and his team proceeded anyway.

Their case depended on arithmetic rather than weather. Hackajob entered the process with a burn multiple below one and reported net revenue retention of 149 percent. The team prepared a board case, an upside case and a downside case, along with separate financial, go-to-market and marketplace data books. Chaffey also discarded the usual advice to rehearse with lower-priority investors. The investors who understood the category best, he reasoned, would ask the questions worth rehearsing.

Company-reported figures from Chaffey's account of the 2023 fundraise.

After 78 investor conversations, Volition Capital led the $25 million round, with existing investors AXA Venture Partners and Foresight participating. Sean Cantwell of Volition joined the board. The financing took disclosed total capital at the time to roughly $33 million and funded a larger push into the United States. Chaffey moved to New York, carrying a company born in London toward customers and talent on both sides of the Atlantic.

The application paradoxWhen easier became worse

Generative AI then changed the hiring market in a manner both obvious and odd. Applying became easier. Applicants could tailor resumes and letters at speed. Employers received far more material. Recruiters, often working in leaner teams, acquired software to sort the software-assisted applications. The result was efficiency in the same sense that adding lanes to a congested road is efficient: movement increased, and so did the traffic.

Chaffey calls this a crisis of trust. Candidates send hundreds of applications and hear little. Employers confront duplicated profiles, exaggerated experience and occasional identity fraud. AI-written resumes encounter AI filters, and in the most absurd cases, deepfake applicants encounter automated interviews. Both sides behave rationally. Together they manufacture farce.

Hackajob's answer is Archer, an agent that moves the work before the formal application. A recruiter explains what a strong hire looks like. Archer searches for people, including those who are not actively applying, starts a conversation, checks their interest and fit, verifies identity, then sends a mutually agreed introduction into the employer's existing applicant-tracking system. The company emphasizes that Archer works before an employment decision and that recruiters retain judgment.

The design returns to hackajob's original reversal. The most interesting candidate may be the one who never filled in the form. Instead of ranking a larger inbound pile, go upstream and create a smaller, more relevant one. It is recruitment as editing. Good judgment often begins with deletion.

“Getting the right person into the right role changes lives. It changes a company's trajectory.”Mark Chaffey, 2026

A dozen years, four formsThe same argument, rewritten

Archer launched in 2025. In February 2026, hackajob said the product had reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue within 90 days of commercial rollout, produced 35,000 double-opt-in introductions and blocked more than 1,500 fraudulent candidates. The company expanded it beyond technical hiring into commercial, operations, product and finance roles. These are company-reported measures, but they explain the size of the decision that followed.

By September, hackajob announced that it was organizing the whole company around Archer. It said more than 600,000 people had signed up in a year and annual recurring revenue had tripled in six months. Chaffey called it the largest bet since the company began and said he had never been more certain of one. A decade as a marketplace had produced an agent for both sides of the market.

There is another loop in the story. In 2025, King's Business School appointed Chaffey an Executive Fellow for a three-year term. The student who helped create a company in a cafeteria returned to contribute to teaching and research on applied AI and entrepreneurship. Universities like symmetry. Founders prefer momentum. Chaffey's customary public sign-off is “Onwards,” usually followed by enough rocket emojis to trouble air-traffic control.

The word fits. Hackajob has been a coding-assessment business, a reverse marketplace, a full-stack platform and now the maker of a recruiting agent. Those changes can look like restlessness. They also reveal continuity. Each version tries to make ability and intent more legible, to reduce the advantage enjoyed by whoever is best at writing the expected document, and to give candidates some say in how they enter the room.

What remains humanThe judgment after the introduction

Chaffey is enthusiastic about what AI can do, sometimes exuberantly so. Yet his product argument depends on boundaries. The agent handles reach, repetition and preliminary qualification. Recruiters define quality and decide. Candidates keep their profiles private until they choose to proceed. The software acts as an advocate, not an employer.

That boundary will be tested. Hiring is full of judgment disguised as process, and historical data can preserve yesterday's preferences with impressive speed. Chaffey's answer is first-party information, transparent reasoning, human feedback and work conducted before the formal application. The claim is practical as much as moral: an enterprise is more likely to adopt AI when its legal, security and recruitment teams can see exactly where the machine stops.

The larger aspiration is audacious. Chaffey wants Archer to help tens of millions of people find meaningful work and tens of thousands of companies find the right people. He has spent twelve years arguing that hiring should notice what a person can do and what they want, rather than reward their stamina for forms. The newest machinery is complicated. The courtesy at its centre is not. Before arranging a meeting, ask both sides if they would like one.