Episode overview

Alisdair Barr’s path to founding Striver is one of the more unusual origin stories in Australian startup land: a decade in corporate banking, then selling the house, going to the desert to run financial literacy programs for indigenous communities, running out of money, and eventually stumbling into graduate recruitment because his banking network kept asking him to help them find people.

Striver is now an HR-tech platform that connects finance and tech graduates with firms looking for their next generation of talent. The business launched its tech version in 2019 after Alisdair raised money from 13 or 14 early investors and digitised what had previously been a manual placement operation. In this episode he talks through the full journey, what he’s learned about hiring young people during COVID, and why growing your own talent beats competing for experienced hires.

From the banking floor to the Western Australian desert

After nearly a decade at a bank he loved, Alisdair left not because of a competitor offer or dissatisfaction, but because he wanted to leave a footprint. He spent 18 months commuting between Sydney and remote communities in Western Australia, running workplace readiness programs for mining companies. It was personally the most rewarding work of his career, even if financially it was not. A mentor asked him the right question: when you’re 94 on a park bench looking back, will you regret not doing this? The answer was yes.

The perfect storm that made Striver digital

Between 2017 and 2019, Australian financial services was hit by the banking royal commission, rising education standards, and a mass exodus from the profession. Alisdair had been running a lifestyle placement business for several years, spending three months in the Greek islands then coming back and placing graduates. A friend with a tech background kept pushing him to turn the lifestyle business into a real company. The royal commission created the window he needed. He raised funding, digitised the operation, and relaunched as Striver in September 2019.

Why growing your own beats hiring for experience

Alisdair is direct: companies that are unwilling to hire graduates while simultaneously complaining about talent shortages are creating the problem themselves. Finance firms already understand this, which is why Striver was built for that market first. Now moving into tech, he argues that engineering graduates with side projects, GitHub portfolios, and part-time jobs are often more motivated and loyal than experienced hires who may bring bad habits along with their credentials.

What COVID revealed about young talent preferences

One of the most unexpected findings from the pandemic: university graduates want to go to an office. Companies that went 100 percent remote as a selling point discovered that students who had spent two years in their parents’ lounges didn’t want remote work as their first professional experience. They want the canteen, the Friday drinks, the social infrastructure of a workplace. Alisdair says he never would have predicted that shift.