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Tangent matches candidates without connections to insiders willing to make introductions – building the referral network from scratch. €1M+ raised.
ENTRY ANGLES
Systematically tap underutilized talent pools for placement · Build baseline training programs to bridge skill gaps · Develop efficient candidate screening for niche talent pools
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Candidate sourcing and screening at scale, Baseline training program design, Employer relationship management and placement support
Referred candidates are nine times more likely to be hired than cold applicants. Eighty-two percent of companies consider employee referrals their most effective hiring channel. And roughly 70% of people find their next job through professional connections.
But what happens when you don't have those connections? That's what Tangent is built for.
Tangent is a platform where job seekers without professional networks can get matched with industry insiders willing to make introductions – and potentially recommend them for open roles.
The startup is currently focused on sales roles in the technology sector: call center positions, customer success, account executives, B2B sales reps, and similar customer-facing functions.
The insiders on the platform are mentors. A mentor explains how the industry works, what skills matter, helps candidates strengthen their resume, and – if the candidate impresses them – can provide a direct referral into their own company.
No prior sales experience is required, though any background in customer-facing work is helpful. A common path through the platform: someone working retail or frontline service looking to move into B2B tech sales.
Tangent has assembled more than 400 mentors from companies across the UK, where the startup is based.
Candidates register for free – and the startup commits to keeping it that way. After signing up, each candidate completes a short online prep course covering the fundamentals of a sales career. The purpose is twofold: help candidates assess whether the role suits them, and ensure they show up to mentor conversations with baseline knowledge rather than starting from zero. Completing the course earns badges for passing tests and assignments – a visible signal of effort that mentors value.
Once the course is done, candidates record a short video introducing themselves: their background, experience, and career goals. The platform includes an AI assistant to help with the script.
The video goes live on the platform, where mentors can browse it. If a mentor likes what they see, they initiate contact through the platform's built-in chat, ask questions, suggest a call, and take things from there. Candidates can engage with multiple mentors simultaneously – which means the best-case scenario is the candidate getting to choose among competing opportunities.
For companies, Tangent adds a structured channel for referral hiring. Referred hires stay 70% longer than candidates sourced through conventional means. And many companies already pay internal referral bonuses – typically 1–3% of a new hire's first-year salary, versus the 15–30% recruiters charge. Tangent gives employees a stream of motivated candidates to refer, making those bonuses much easier to earn.
Tangent recently exited beta and raised its first meaningful outside round: €1M. A small pre-seed round preceded this.
If companies didn't already pay referral bonuses, selling a platform like Tangent would be an uphill battle. Nothing is harder to sell than behavior change. The smarter move is to find what's already happening and make it work better.
Tangent doesn't ask companies to do something new. It gives them a tool to do something they already do – hire through referrals – more systematically. That framing makes the sales conversation dramatically easier.
The first general lesson: spend less energy convincing. More energy finding the "you already do this" hook. The sell gets much easier when the foundation is something the customer already believes in.
What also matters is who Tangent is serving on the candidate side. The platform is explicitly designed for people from lower-income or socially mobile backgrounds, for whom professional networks simply don't exist. For this group, Tangent can be a genuine ladder up – and they need no convincing that the opportunity is valuable.
The market gap is significant: only 9% of tech workers come from working-class backgrounds, while working-class adults represent roughly 39% of the broader population in the UK. That's not just a social equity gap – it's a talent pipeline problem.
Diversity and inclusion policy has accelerated attention to this issue, but the deeper driver is economics. Labor shortages across developed economies aren't easing. Companies can't keep poaching the same engineers and sales reps from each other at escalating cost. They need new pipelines.
There are several ways to build them. The first – which Tangent is pursuing – is recruiting from backgrounds recruiters have historically overlooked. The talent is there; it just hasn't had access to the right networks.
The second is gender representation. Women make up roughly 4.8% of the developer workforce despite being half the population. Code First Girls, [covered here](/review/zhirnyj-kusok-rynka-obrazovanija) in late 2022, is addressing this with coding courses for women and has raised £4.5M.
The third is disability inclusion. In the US, 26% of adults have some form of health-related limitation. Inclusively, [covered previously](/review/tri-novyh-vozmozhnosti-dlja-26-vzroslogo-naselenija), started as a hiring platform for people with disabilities and has since expanded to other underrepresented groups; its total funding now stands at $19.9M.
The fourth is geographic arbitrage: finding skilled talent in developing markets and connecting them to remote roles in developed economies. Microverse, [a related review](/review/kuriruemoe-samoobrazovanie), trains developers in Africa and Latin America for remote positions at US and European companies. Their total funding is $19.7M.
The broad direction: platforms that systematically address the qualified talent shortage by opening up underutilized supply.
The key is identifying a large, accessible pool that hasn't yet been tapped at scale. The options listed above each have evidence behind them. None requires inventing the pipeline from scratch – there are working models to build on.
For any given niche, the questions worth answering: Where is the supply? How do you find and screen candidates efficiently? What baseline training bridges the gap? What does the employer relationship look like? What ongoing support makes these placements stick?
The problem is real, the demand from employers is documented, and working examples exist. There's no need to start from zero.