Meet Holly Hobbs

Finding a job as a young person is, in Holly Hobbs's words, "a damn hard struggle at the moment". She has built her career around making it easier.

From apprentice to founder

Holly started out as an apprentice herself. She went on to found a company that helped young people get into apprenticeships, and that business grew to work with leading employers including British Gas, BT Group and Volkswagen Group as their talent attraction partner.

She later merged that business into urfuture and became its co-founder. urfuture is a job app for Gen Z that matches young people to jobs using behavioural science rather than CVs. Its matching is built on around 1,000 hours of interviews with a University of Oxford professor across 18 career categories, and the company has raised around 1.7 million to grow and scale the app. Holly has been in business for around four years.

Building something defensible

On the bench, Holly spoke about the importance of building businesses that are defensible through their own data. She is also a hands-on user of AI herself, running an AI agent on a Mac Mini to support her B2B marketing.

Looking after the founder

Holly was refreshingly open about the personal side of building a company. She talked about self-belief, about mental capacity, and about the importance of founders prioritising themselves.

Speaking at Legacy Bench Live in front of students and founders at the University of Manchester, she brought the perspective of someone who has walked the path from apprentice to co-founder, and who is now using technology to open doors for the next generation.

Holly Hobbs joined us on The Legacy Bench for "My Business Is Run By AI", recorded at Legacy Bench Live at the University of Manchester — read the episode story or watch the full conversation.