What does the future of flexible working look like? – Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO, Flexa

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UKTN

Technology, Entrepreneur, Tech, Business, Hr, Sales, Uktech, Investing, Funding, Entrepreneurship, Marketing

5 • 6 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Flexa CEO and co-founder Molly Johnson-Jones discusses the future of flexible working, how companies can “turn hiring into marketing” and why she thinks some corporate CEOs are using flexible working as a scapegoat for innovation failures.

Flexa is a careers platform that aggregates a company’s workplace benefits to give job candidates more information when applying for a role. Johnson-Jones co-founded the company in 2020 – alongside Maurice O’Brien, and Tim Leppard – after she was told to leave her job in investment banking. It came after Johnson-Jones, who has an auto-immune disease, had submitted a flexible work request. Flexa aims to inform job candidates about a company’s remote working and benefits policies. Approved companies, which include the likes of Atom Bank and Improbable, can then advertise open roles on the platform and applicants can filter by criteria. More than 2.5 million people now use the platform. In 2022, the startup raised £2m in a seed funding round led by Ada Ventures. Elsewhere in this episode, the Flexa CEO looks at the different approaches startups and corporates are taking for flexible working.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And so I was told after about 18 months being at that company that they were open to flexible
0:10.4	working requests and that I should put one in, so I did. About 10 days later they put a settlement
0:16.3	package in front of me, told me I was underperforming and to leave immediately.
0:20.7	There are loads of different ways of doing it, but the in-person contact I do think is incredibly important
0:26.6	because remote and in-person work are complementary, they're not opposing.
0:30.6	And I think there's a really interesting trend at the moment of the CEOs of large corporates
0:36.6	blaming flexible working for their problems
0:39.0	because it buys them time.
0:45.8	From the first-time founders to the funds that backed them, innovation needs different.
0:51.4	Our episode partner, HSBC Innovation Banking, is proud to accelerate growth for
0:56.7	tech and life science businesses, creating meaningful connections and opening up a world of opportunity
1:02.4	for entrepreneurs and investors alike. Discover more at www.hbcInnovationbanking.com
1:10.2	slash EN- gb.
1:16.6	Hello and welcome to the UKTN podcast, a weekly chat with the movers and shapers of the UK tech industry and the destination for all things UK tech related. I'm your host,
1:29.3	Jane Wakefield, and joining me this week is Molly Johnson-Jones, the co-founder of Flexor,
1:34.3	a startup aimed at helping people find flexible work. Welcome, Molly. Thank you very much for having
1:39.3	me, a lovely sphere. Now, this is such a fascinating subject, and it feels as if it's something
1:43.8	that everybody's talking about at the moment.
1:46.6	So let's start by you explain to me what it is that Flexa did, and also a bit about your own backstory around why this became important to you.
1:57.5	Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, it probably makes the most sense to start with why
2:01.9	and earth we started a startup and why we decided to build Flexa. So it kind of actually all
2:07.1	started in 2017 without us really realizing that that was happening. But yeah, that was where
	...

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