The conversation began with the weather. On 9 February 2012, Razvan Creanga was flying from Amsterdam to London when the passenger beside him asked about conditions back home. Creanga had been away for three days. He had not checked the forecast. It had been raining when he left. So far, an entirely respectable exchange between people on their way to Britain.
Over the next 45 minutes, the discussion wandered into money, entrepreneurship and the difference a person might make. In Creanga’s later account, the stranger’s fixation on impact changed his definition of success. He had already been making things online. Now he began asking what those things were for. An airline seat had briefly become a business school with unusually limited legroom.
That question would outlast several businesses. It would eventually lead him to a peculiar bottleneck: skilled people trying to explain themselves to employers through documents that could conceal as much as they revealed.
The experience before the experience
Creanga grew up in Romania. His parents bought a computer when he was seven; he discovered programming at eight. By about eleven, he was working on more substantial online projects. Website commissions followed, then a digital agency while he was still at school. What began as the pleasure of solving a difficult problem acquired clients.
There is a neat irony here. Someone reading the employment history of a young developer might see a short career. The developer might remember a childhood spent learning the craft. Creanga later described exactly this mismatch: the years on a CV could seriously understate the years spent coding. A job title arrives late to a story that has already been running.
His agency gave him an introduction to international customers. It also exposed a limit. He wanted a business that could grow beyond the familiar exchange of another project for another chunk of somebody’s time. Being able to build a website was useful. Deciding which business deserved building was a different skill, and one he was still acquiring.
London supplied further ways to learn. He studied computer science at City University London and international marketing at King’s College London. In summer 2012, he interned in Credit Suisse’s Office of IT Strategy. The combination put software, customers and a large institution’s working methods within the same field of view. His later venture would need to speak all three languages.
First, a network. Then, a printer.
Before hackajob, there was BackersClub, a network connecting entrepreneurs and investors. Its central proposition already involved matching: help the right people find one another. Creanga’s work included attracting investors, pitching and developing commercial relationships. Technology could make an introduction possible; somebody still had to persuade people to participate.
Then came 3D Ventures and Candy, a consumer food printer. A printer for sweets is an appealing detour in any founder’s biography. It gives the reader something considerably more enjoyable to imagine than a spreadsheet. Yet the outcome was a practical lesson in timing. The founders received orders, but decided the consumer market was not ready and stopped working on the business in 2014.
That decision deserves room beside the founding dates. A working product and an available market are separate achievements. Candy had demonstrated the first without convincing its makers about the second. Creanga’s route to recruitment included learning when to close a project, an entrepreneurial skill rarely given a commemorative photograph.
In his subsequent writing, he warned about the distraction of too many opportunities. The warning has some weight coming from someone whose projects had included both business networks and edible printing. An idea can be interesting, technically possible and still take attention away from the work most likely to matter.
A hiring problem in plain sight
The opening for hackajob appeared while Creanga was helping a recruitment agency with its digital strategy. He watched people without technical training assess technical candidates. The arrangement troubled him. An evaluator might be perfectly competent at recruitment while lacking the knowledge needed to distinguish one programmer’s ability from another’s.
He proposed a joint business to the agency’s chief executive. The answer was a refusal, accompanied by encouragement to pursue it himself. Creanga found a co-founder in Mark Chaffey, another King’s student. They started hackajob in November 2014. A conversation with a prospective partner had produced no partnership, but it had helped make the next decision clear.
They were addressing several linked frustrations. Finding developers cost money. Understanding their abilities required expertise. Getting from first contact to an accepted offer took time. A CV could organize employment dates beautifully while providing a poor answer to the question an engineering team actually needed answered: what can this person do?
The early business gave candidates opportunities to demonstrate their skills through coding challenges and used that information to help connect them with employers. The appeal was easy to grasp. A programmer could present work alongside a description of work. The company was trying to make that evidence useful inside the hiring process.
Watch the interview ↗The human being beside the algorithm
It would be easy to imagine the whole proposition ending at a score. Creanga’s explanation of the service was more involved. By 2018, hackajob paired candidates with a Talent Advocate who could discuss opportunities and help them navigate the search. The advocate was not incentivized to place a person in a particular job.
His advice to developers also extended beyond producing good code. He recommended showing work online through GitHub, and learning to communicate it. An engineer needed to explain a codebase, talk about skills and make their contribution understandable to other people. Demonstrated ability still required a conversation. The platform’s purpose was to improve the chances of having a useful one.
“The innovation index is far too low in recruitment - and I want to change that.”
Razvan Creanga, writing in 2019
He extended the argument to employers. A smaller company could use the platform to explain the interesting work it was doing, rather than rely on name recognition. Better information could help both sides. Candidates could become more than a collection of familiar credentials; employers could become more than a logo and a vacancy.
His writing about unconscious bias addressed the same problem from another direction. Hiring decisions could be shaped by signals unrelated to competence. Making skills more visible was his proposed response. That remains an ambition rather than an automatic property of software: a tool still has to choose which evidence to measure and how to interpret it.
- 01Show the workMake practical skills visible.
- 02Find the fitConnect ability with an opportunity.
- 03Talk it throughGive the person a conversation.
An editorial diagram of the approach Creanga described.
London’s doors, Romania’s talent
The company grew inside a network as well as a market. Creanga and Chaffey joined King’s Pop-Up Incubating Space in March 2015. Hackajob went through Techstars London that year. By the launch of King’s next accelerator programme in 2016, the founders were welcoming a new intake, with an international team of fifteen, 25,000 job-seekers and 200 employers behind their own business.
The founders credited Anandana Bakshi at King’s with introducing them to industry leaders they would otherwise have struggled to meet. It is a revealing connection in a story about matching. They were building software to improve access to jobs while benefiting from a person who improved their access to people.
In 2017, Creanga joined a King’s entrepreneurship tour aboard the Venture Bus, alongside other alumni and founders. Students visited parts of London’s startup community and met people running businesses. The route from student to founder had begun to loop back: experience acquired outside the classroom was returning as something another student could use.
Romania remained part of his working geography. Hackajob developed a team in Iași. Creanga described a country rich in technical ability but with a thinner support network for entrepreneurs. He wanted more practical exchange about pitching investors, reaching customers and scaling companies. Knowing how to write the software was one part of the journey; knowing whom to call could change the rest.
Funding led by AXA Venture Partners, with Downing Ventures participating. Capital for the business Creanga and Chaffey had started four years earlier.
Changing the job on his own CV
In late 2018, Creanga took the skills discussion to 10 Downing Street, participating in a conversation about the UK’s digital skills gap. The problem had a public dimension as well as a commercial one. If employers could not identify the people they needed, a recruitment failure could also look like a shortage of talent.
Forbes Romania included him in its 2019 “30 sub 30” selection. Recognition arrived alongside a more substantial change in his working life. In November 2019, after five years as hackajob’s chief executive, he became chairman. In April 2023, he moved to an advisory role. The company remained part of his career while his place inside it changed.
Co-founds hackajob with Mark Chaffey.
Moves from CEO to chairman in November.
Becomes an adviser in April.
Lists a new founder and CEO role from June.
His public biography now lists him as founder and CEO of a stealth startup, based in London, alongside the hackajob advisory position. He describes himself simply as an entrepreneur and sports lover. After a career involving a bank, a printer and a hiring platform, the brevity is rather welcome.
The most telling thread is the attention he gives to what a first impression misses. A young coder may have years of practice. An unfamiliar employer may have absorbing work. A useful introduction may begin with a question about rain. Creanga’s career has returned to the work of making those possibilities easier to see.