Why I'm Building Hirely: Hire People You Will Want to Work With Again

Most hiring platforms are very good at the first hire and quietly bad at the second. You find someone, agree the work, pay, and then the history of it lives in scattered emails and invoices. When you want that person back, you start over. Hirely is my attempt to fix that one gap. This note covers why it exists, what it does today, and what is still not finished.

Hirely is a paid marketplace build. It is separate from my free tools, TaskCue and Circles Finance, and it is not a free community tool. You can look around the live product at hirely.samikhanapps.com.

The problem: the second project should be easier than the first

In 25 years of product and delivery work, I have watched teams lose value every time a working relationship resets. The first project with a good person is full of effort: scoping, agreeing terms, learning how each other works. If it goes well, the most valuable thing you have is that person. Yet the tools around hiring rarely help you keep them.

So I started from a different question. Not "how do I find someone quickly?" but "how do I make it easy to hire the same good person again?" Everything in Hirely follows from that.

Who it is for

Hirely is aimed at small and mid-sized teams, founders and managers who hire skilled talent on a regular basis. It is also aimed at independent professionals who would rather have repeat clients than keep pitching for new ones. The two sides want the same thing: a relationship that gets easier over time.

How it works

Shortlist, don't gamble. Clients search for talent by skill, rate, availability and location. People you like go into Favorites, so you can compare them before you reach out. The shortlist is yours to keep and build over time.

Requests. If you would rather describe the work first, you post a request and compare the quotes that come back. A request is a conversation about scope and terms, not a race to the lowest number.

Engagements. When a request is accepted, it becomes an engagement. This is the idea I care about most. An engagement is one record for the work between one client and one person. Payments, milestones and reviews all stay inside it. When you want to work with that person again, you are not starting from a blank page. The second project begins where the first one ended.

Teams. A client account can invite colleagues as administrators, managers or coordinators, and each role sees only what it needs. Accounts can be protected with two-factor sign-in, and there is a log of signed-in devices.

How money moves

Money goes through a Hirely wallet. The client adds funds for an engagement, Hirely holds them, and they are released to the talent when the client approves the work. Work can be split into milestones, each funded up front and paid on approval. Talent withdraw to their bank account. Hirely's commission is shown before anyone pays.

The thinking behind it is simple. Much of the friction in paid work is about timing: who pays what, and when. Holding funds against agreed milestones puts that timing in front of both sides before the work starts.

A picture of the second project

Here is an illustration, not a real case. Imagine a founder who brings in a designer for a first project, with three milestones. Each is funded, delivered, approved and paid, and the designer receives a review. Months later the founder needs more design work. With Hirely, the designer is already in Favorites and the first engagement already holds the agreed terms and the history. The founder sends a new request to someone they know instead of searching again. That is the whole product idea in one sentence: less starting over.

How I am building it

I am building Hirely as both product owner and developer, and the scope is deliberately narrow: shortlists, requests, engagements, wallet and milestones, team roles and security. It is built with React and TypeScript on the front end and a Node.js backend, with MySQL for data. I will share more of what I learn as it develops, including the parts that do not go to plan.

What it costs

There are three plans: Free, Basic at $19 a month and Premium at $49 a month. Hirely takes a 10% commission on payments to talent, and there is no fee to withdraw to a bank account. Talent can add an optional boost for visibility, from $15 for 7 days. The pricing page has the full detail, and it is the source of truth if anything here differs.

Where it stands today

I would rather be plain about this than oversell it.

• Card payments are not live yet. Until they are, payments inside the app are simulated and clearly labelled as simulated. No real money moves.
• Mobile apps are coming soon. Today it is a web product.
• The terms and privacy policy are still drafts.

Telling you this now is better than having you find it later. A marketplace is a trust product, and trust starts with saying what is and is not finished.

What I am treating as the hard part

The screens are the easy part. The hard part of a repeat-hiring product is the record behind each engagement. It has to be accurate and complete, and it has to be something both sides are happy to rely on a year later. That means being careful about what counts as "approved", what counts as "funded", and what a review is allowed to say. I would rather get those definitions right in a small product than add features on top of vague ones.

It also means saying no to things. Hirely does not try to be the cheapest place to find someone, and it does not try to list everyone. It tries to be a good place to keep the people you already trust.

What I would like feedback on

If you hire talent regularly, or you are talent who wants repeat clients, I would value your honest view. The question I keep asking myself is simple: what would make you rehire someone without a second thought? If you have a clear answer, I would like to hear it.

You can find me on LinkedIn, see the rest of my work at samikhanapps.com, or try Hirely at hirely.samikhanapps.com.