Our commitment: why HIRING UK exists and the road we chose
8 minute read · 2026-10-18
Every company owes the people it serves a plain account of itself: where it comes from, what it is for, and what it will and will not do. This is ours. It is not a list of achievements, because a young company has few of those. It is a record of facts, of the directions we took and of what we intend, written down so that anybody can hold us to it.
Where it started
I have been in business since 2005. The first company, in Romania, was registered to carry out every activity in the national classification, all of it, from the commonest trade to the rarest. It was an odd way to start, and a telling one: I have never wanted to choose between the work people do. All of it matters to somebody. The law asked for a share capital of 2 million lei (old lei, the currency before that year's redenomination). I put in 580 million, with another 120 million ready to follow: at the time, the price of a large three bedroom flat in Iași. For a long stretch that company spent several million lei every week on advertising in the city's printed press, with television campaigns alongside. That was where I learned what a budget is for: to reach people, honestly and often.
In the years that followed I was general manager at several companies, for years at a time, sole director of some and a partner in others. Along the way I sat on the hiring side of more than five thousand interviews, and trained people and whole teams for clearly defined, specific tasks. Different trades, the same lesson every time: a business is the people in it and the people it serves.
From one second city to another
There is a pattern in this story that I only noticed later. My business grew up in Iași, for decades Romania's second city by population, and twice its capital. For more than twelve years now, home has been Birmingham, the second city of the United Kingdom. Told like that, it sounds like a fairy tale. It was not chance: we prepared the move for a full year before we came here for good.
We came as a family, and none of us came empty handed. My wife was an executive manager before we arrived and has been a manager for years since; she is a British citizen and is now in her fourth year of a law degree in Birmingham. Our daughter and son-in-law graduated in finance, banking and accounting, and in business management. A good education, real experience, and a set of challenges we chose to take on together: that is what brought us to the Kingdom, and what has guided us here.
In the United Kingdom came years behind the wheel in driving and logistics. That is where I saw hiring from the end most people never write about: adverts that hide the pay, calls that come once and never again, forms that take forty minutes and lead nowhere, and small firms that cannot afford thousands of pounds to fill a role they will need to fill again next year. I did not forget any of it.
The groundwork nobody saw
Long before this site existed, I was drawing the map for it. Over the years I registered close to six hundred companies at Companies House (585, to be exact), under names such as Jobs UK followed by a city or a trade: one for almost every large town and almost every occupation in the official list, down to an activity that, in practice, only the Bank of England carries out. Alongside them, more than five thousand web addresses. Most of those companies have never traded, and they were not meant to yet. They are the outline of a network, set out in advance, waiting for the day the first part of it was ready to stand on its own. The plan was a thousand. Why it stopped at close to six hundred is the next part of this story.
That day is now, and the first part is this job board.
The fall, and why the direction did not change
Plans meet life. Fitting a sheet of plasterboard, I came off a ladder with it and broke my arm. Four months without work, a good deal of pain, and a budget that had been meant for building went on getting better instead. Something changed, and I stopped, not by choice. So I used the stop: I thought the whole plan through again, recalibrated it and started again, a restart and a refocus with the same destination. The plan was pushed a little off its line and arrived a little later. It did not turn round.
If I have learned one thing, it is that direction matters more than speed. I never neglected speed, but I spent far longer making sure of the direction, because arriving late on the right road beats arriving early on the wrong one. I have fallen more times than I can count, some of them literally, and I have got up every time.
What kept me going
For years I have read the people who wrote about work, character and perseverance, and I have kept their words close. Those lines fed the imagination, kept the dream in view and steadied the resolve on the days when there was not much else to go on. Through the rises and the falls, they were the reason to take the next step. That is why there is a daily dose of motivation on this site, free for everybody, every day: if a sentence could do that for me, it can do it for somebody looking for work at eleven at night. One of them I have carried longer than any other:
"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."
What HIRING UK is
HIRINGUK LTD was incorporated on 21 August 2026 and is based in Birmingham. It is a meeting place: on one side, the people looking for work; on the other, the employers looking for them; and us in the middle, working for both and making sure both are treated fairly. An employer places an advert at a price published for everybody. The advert says what the job pays. Every application goes straight to the employer, with the CV attached. Nobody's details are sold, and nobody is charged for looking.
Our specialism is every job. Not one sector or one kind of worker: the jobs advertised every day and the ones hardly anybody does, each with its own page and its pay. The rules we hold ourselves to are published in full, so they can be checked rather than taken on trust: how we handle CVs, our policies, our paperwork.
Where we are going
Step by step. First, a job board that is honestly full, with real adverts from real employers across the country. Next, a search that gathers jobs from across the UK into one place, with the pay shown. After that, the rest of the network that the groundwork above was always meant for. The order is fixed; the dates will move when they must, and when they do, we will say so on our About page rather than quietly change them.
And we mean to be wherever people look for work and wherever employers talk to each other. That is why the foot of every page carries so many social channels. They are not there for decoration: a job is filled only when the right person sees it, and people are in many different places. So we will be in all of them.
There is a lot of work in that, and nobody asked us to do it. But the people who most need a fair, plain place to look for work, and the small employers who most need a fair price to find them, are exactly the ones easiest to leave behind. Somebody has to build it for them. We decided it would be us.
The four principles we work by
- We put people first. The candidate applying late at night and the employer worried about the cost come before the money. Look after them, and the business follows.
- The pay on every advert. If a job is worth advertising, it is worth saying what it pays.
- No CV database. Your CV goes to the employer you sent it to, and to nobody else. It is not for sale, today or ever.
- The door is open to anyone, for any job. Every trade, every town, every person who wants to work.
That is our commitment. Hold us to it.
Grigore Octavian Pupazan, Founder and director, HIRINGUK LTD
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