A team made up of three young entrepreneurs, Carlos Ibáñez, Edgar Gago, and Guillem Moreno, turned their time at the Emprèn UPC Terrassa space into a business for finding the "best" ICT talent. It all started in 2019, when these aerospace engineering students wanted to push forward their own project, which covid interrupted and reoriented towards a booming segment: programming.
Nuwe is currently a hiring platform that "breaks molds." Based on gamification and the use of competitions, events, and digital and in-person challenges, it is aimed at people who want to dedicate themselves to ICT and who know that, although their academic curriculum does not meet the company's requirements, they do have sufficient skills to correctly develop the requested work.
"We realized that many people, especially programmers, complained on social media about companies' personnel selection processes, mainly because there is a lack of feedback and transparency in all of them," argues Guillem Moreno.
The promoters of Nuwe confirm that many professionals are entering the programming sector who are making a change in academic or professional orientation, who are ultimately self-taught programmers. This implies that in a job search their resume does not meet the requirements and that they are often forced "to falsify it."
"Currently, resumes do not endorse the real capacities and knowledge of potential workers and, therefore, a selection process creates frustration in the candidate, but also for human resources managers who spend effort and time and who often choose the wrong candidate," according to Moreno. An example: in one of the latest competitions, a young man who had not even obtained his ESO degree took first place.
The Nuwe platform offers more tailored solutions for demanding companies so that a selection takes into account above all the candidate's skills and professional profile, not so much their academic background. "In days and not months, hirings can be closed and the margin of error reduced" with the choice of candidates who "increasingly value the treatment they can receive from the company and working conditions, beyond economic ones," he adds.
Online competitions, hackathons, digital challenges in the metaverse... are designed and promoted by Nuwe with the company's team of 10 people. "We collaborate with universities, we spread the word on social media, Discord, and also with programming influencers who have between 20,000 and 50,000 followers."
In each event, "we simulate the labor reality of the companies that hire us; we analyze their day-to-day technical needs and transform them into competitions." Companies such as CaixaBank, Oracle, Novartis, Banco Santander, and Schneider Electric are some of the firms that have trusted Nuwe to grow their ICT areas.
The design and promotion of the competitions are carried out by the Nuwe teamLabor inclusion is, therefore, one of Nuwe's differentiating characteristics, in all its areas, as demonstrated bythe call for FemHack, the first international online hackathon for women programmersthat wants to increase female presence in the tech industry and create role models to inspire more women to develop their professional careers as programmers.
In May of this year, Nuwe entered the Fase Traction program of the Lanzadera accelerator and is finalizing a financing program that will allow scaling the platform and expanding the sales and marketing team. The goal is to grow in Spain to, in a second phase of the project, make the leap to Latin America and Europe, with small local structures that reinforce the Barcelona headquarters, which will remain responsible for technological development.
For now, the expansion is being approached with new financial resources that they plan to obtain through a convertible note program, a type of short-term participating loan with which they want to raise about 350,000 euros, as a preliminary step to a financing round that could be launched in the first half of 2023.