Entrepreneurial trio launch streamlined platform to make it easy for businesses in Exeter to create Kickstart jobs
A team of three digital marketing and tech experts based in the South West have launched what they believe is the most user-friendly and comprehensive platform to enable smaller businesses to apply to the government’s recently launched Kickstart Scheme.
They have been confirmed as an official gateway provider and they are hoping that it might make it easier for the thousands of SMEs in Exeter and across the South West to benefit from.
KickstartGo has just one simple form that businesses need to complete if they want to make an application for a job placement. As soon as there are 30 applications on the system (the minimum the government will allow), KickstartGo will submit them as a batch to the government.
The platform then acts as a one-stop portal that businesses can log into, centrally managing all the information about each job and the government payments. In addition, it provides a range of free online training resources that each recruited candidate can use and centrally logs the details of their activity. This makes it easy for the business to demonstrate the support they have provided to the candidate, which is one of the essential criteria of the funding.
Jon Basker, Geoff Roberts and Deon Fourie, who also run a small digital marketing business together and work regularly with SMEs across the South West, came up with the idea for KickstartGo after they decided to apply for a placement through the scheme and found the process offered by most gateway providers time consuming and difficult.
Basker says: “When we looked into the current options out there for applying to the Kickstart Scheme and saw how convoluted and time consuming the process was, we realised there would be a lot of businesses that would say it was too much hassle and walk away, even though they would really benefit from the scheme.
“The jobs market is so tough at the moment, with young people the worst affected – there are currently more than half a million people on Universal Credit that would be eligible for a job placement through this scheme. Our background is in digital and tech and we all have a passion for helping small businesses and start-ups, so this just seemed the obvious thing to do - to develop a platform that uses automation to make it really easy for businesses and help enable the funding for as many job placements as we can.”
They soft released KickstartGo three weeks ago and have already had 47 employers sign up, applying for 107 roles so far. The roles they are applying for are equally broad and include social media, animal care, kitchen work, social care, customer service and office administration.
“We’ve seen a huge demand for KickstartGo already, so we’re really excited to see how far it can go once we actively start promoting it” says Basker. “Our plan is to keep developing it to make it even better for businesses. We’re talking to training providers to see what else we can add to the platform and we’re going to be running webinars on topics like using social media for business. We can even white label the software for organisations that want to offer their own automated gateway portal.”
Find out more by visiting the website at https://kickstartgo.co.uk or contact the team on hello@kickstartgo.co.uk.
