Yomi Tejumola applied to Google about 50 times. Microsoft, McKinsey, Accenture, and Ernst & Young too.
Every time, the same result: automatic rejection.
Why? Because his undergraduate degree was a 2:2, a classification that sits just below what most elite employers will consider. In UK graduate recruitment, it's an automatic door slam.
It doesn't matter what you did after. Yomi went on to get a Master's from Warwick with distinction and earned the highest score the program had ever recorded.
But it didn't matter. The filters had already made their decision. One outcome from his past had become a ban for life from the companies he wanted to work for.
The application tests for numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, and logical reasoning didn’t help his case either.
"I just never used to finish on time," Yomi says. "I'd still be on question five when the timer is gone. And I know a lot of people who were not as qualified as me who've gotten jobs because they could pass this test. I just found it a very, very unfair way to classify people."
The system wasn't measuring intelligence. It was measuring compliance with a format. And as you’ll soon see, compliance often isn’t Yomi’s style.
Despite these barriers, Yomi would end up working for Google a few years later.
Not through their front door. Through a side entrance that didn't filter out quality candidates who didn't happen to check every box.
Once he was inside, he proved his value every single day to the point where his manager told him: "We need more Yomis."
The same company that rejected him 50 times now wanted him to find more people exactly like him.
The irony wasn't lost on Yomi. Neither was the opportunity.
The Side Door Opens
A personal connection changed everything.
Yomi helped a friend prepare for her job interviews. He polished her CV, coached her on what to say, and walked her through the tech industry's unwritten rules.
She shined in her job and quickly landed a contract role at a marketing agency where her hourly rate was double what her previous salary was.
A few months later, she messaged Yomi to say: "There's an opening here for a marketing automation specialist. I can refer you."
The pay was double what Yomi was making in his current position as well, so he took the interview and got the job.
For the first time, Yomi was working at an agency and the clients were the Sonys, Ciscos, and VMwares of the world. He was doing enterprise-level work, engineering campaign systems and workflows using tools like Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce.
He walked in expecting to learn from experts.
What he found was chaos dressed in prestige.
"I started working there. And I kid you not, all of the other specialists on the team had no clue what they were doing. I was stunned that they had all these big clients while performing at junior levels."
Yomi quickly became a senior specialist at the agency as he found faster and more elegant solutions to problems than other people on the agency’s team.
The agency wasn’t setting anyone up for success. They had no real vetting process, no proper onboarding, and minimal levels of training to develop their team members.
Yomi excelled despite the environment around him and was happy to be earning more than he was previously and to finally be working with enterprise-level companies.
Until one day, by chance, he saw behind the curtain. He opened a file and saw the rate card that showed what the agency charged clients for the hours he worked. The markup was massive.
"The difference was huge. Like, really, really huge. And it just got me thinking that it can’t be so hard to set up an agency. If these guys could win contracts with these huge enterprise clients, and charge this much even though I just came in here and quickly became one of their most valuable resources...Building what they built can't be so hard."
The seed was planted that someone who could actually source, vet, and develop talent properly could build something better.
The Crowbar
Finding side doors was a pattern for Yomi. Years earlier, after growing sick of failing so many timed aptitude tests, he built something called TestGenie.
He'd noticed something interesting. If you applied to a company with a different email address, you could take the same test again. Same questions.
So he started applying with throwaway emails, screenshotting the questions, changing the numbers slightly, and rebuilding them as practice versions. At first he gave them away for free on job forums like The Milk Round. Then he started charging.
Emails flooded in. People who'd been failing these tests for years were suddenly passing. Getting interviews. Landing jobs at Ernst & Young, Barclays, places that would have automatically binned their applications.
"People would email me back like, oh wow, you know, this really helped me. I have a job at Ernst & Young. I wasn't able to pass this test before but you gave me the practice."
Yomi had built a crowbar for the gate that was standing between quality candidates and their dream jobs.
Then a few months later, a courier knocked on his door with an international letter. Thick envelope. Very official.
Inside was a cease-and-desist from SHL, the company that makes those tests for half the corporations in the world. There was a lot of lawyer language and serious threats that if he didn’t take the website down, he would be sued for £50,000 in damages.
Most people would panic. Delete everything. Apologize. Disappear.
Yomi took the letter to a frame shop.
"For me, that moment was more triumphant than anything," he says. "Like, ‘Yes!, I finally got their attention’. I have the subpoena framed at home. I took the website down, but I felt like I had done what I wanted to do."
The letter still hangs on his wall today.
Jollof Rice in a Jaguar
While deployed through the agency to work on a handful of projects at Google, Yomi was running another side hustle.
He was annoyed that his favorite Nigerian restaurants didn't deliver. So he decided to fix it himself.
He bought two scooters. Hired two drivers. Walked into restaurants in Burnt Oak with a pitch. I'll handle your deliveries, you add a delivery fee to the order, we split it.
The problem was the whole setup only worked when the restaurants called him when orders came in to coordinate the delivery. But the restaurants often forgot to call. And when they did call, Yomi had to find ways to answer discreetly.
"I was getting calls each day while working at my desk in Google’s offices. I couldn’t take these calls while next to all my co-workers so I was going to the bathroom each time to pick up the phone and dispatch my drivers. People were like, dude, you go to the toilet a lot. What's going on?"
His colleagues thought he had a medical condition when really he was building a delivery business from bathroom stalls.
And his drivers weren’t always reliable on the weekends so Yomi often did those deliveries himself. In his Jaguar XF.
"Customers would order jollof rice expecting a guy on a moped but instead see a luxury sedan pull up. Their reactions were pretty funny."
After a handful of months, Yomi realized the economics didn’t quite work for his business model. And he saw other companies enter the market with better execution and venture backing.
So he shut the delivery business down but learned a critical lesson:
Sell to the person actually feels the pain, not the middleman.
"If I had to do it again, I would have gone direct to the end customer. I started the thing because I couldn't get the food I wanted delivered to me. So I should have just targeted others like me."
"We Need More Yomis"
Google was so impressed with his work they recruited him out of the agency and gave him a role in marketing automation and analytics, supporting ten regional marketing leads for Google Cloud.
Even though the pay was actually lower than what he earned at the agency, he took it anyway.
"It was Google. I had to say yes, right? It would provide a lot of opportunities to work with incredibly smart people and actually learn from them, instead of being the smartest one in the room."
He was tired of being the most capable person on the team. He wanted to be challenged.
The team grew fast. Yomi's work was visible as reliable and High-quality.
His manager, based in the US, pulled him aside one day.
"We need more Yomis. Do you know anyone in your network who could be a good fit?"
The company that had filtered him out based on a grade from years ago now wanted clones of him.
Yomi did not know anyone who could fill the role but he said yes anyway. And then he asked the question that would birth Algomarketing:
"Can I bring them in through my own staffing agency?"
The hiring manager was in dire straits because quality talent was harder to find than they'd expected and they needed capable people ASAP. He said yes so long as Yomi’s company could get cleared through procurement.
The requirements were clear. To work with Google as a supplier, you needed:
- A registered company with a proper corporate structure
- A website showing your products and services
- At least three full-time employees
- Insurance, compliance documentation, and more on their enterprise vendor checklist
Yomi had one employee: himself.
So he did what any reasonable person would do.
He called up his mom and his accountant to convince them to be added as employees of his company. Then he built a website over the weekend, made sure he ticked every box, and submitted the application to Google’s procurement department.
It worked.
He became a supplier to Google.
The First Algo
Yomi bought LinkedIn Recruiter and went hunting.
But he wasn't looking for the people who'd pass Google's filters.
He was looking for people like him.
It didn’t matter if they went to the “wrong” university or had a few poor grades from years ago that still haunted them or a brain that didn’t perform well on timed tests.
He wanted smart, capable people who could architect systems that actually worked.
Good candidates started to come through. He built a shortlist. Ran interviews to vet not just for capability but for the “soft stuff” too like cultural fit and communication style.
And he carried that attention to detail through from the hiring process into the onboarding process.
"I was able to really onboard this person, and not just in the tools and processes and the things they needed to do. I also trained them on how to interact with the different stakeholders. How the different key stakeholders like to be treated. It was a holistic level of onboarding to really help them to be ready and prepared."
He taught them to be “Googley” so they could speak the language, navigate the culture, and understand the unwritten rules that nobody puts in the handbook.
When the new hire started working with the regional marketing managers, the reaction was immediate.
"Everyone was like, ‘Oh wow, where did you find this person? It feels like this person has been working with us for years. He knows the lingo, he knows how to find things’. There wasn't a ramp-up period or anything. They just came in knowing everything."
No friction and no awkward adjustment period.
The team stopped wanting to hire any other way and word spread to other teams at Google. Then word spread to other companies as well.
The side hustle was becoming a real business.
The Side Hustle That Became A $24M Business
What started as a bold side hustle now operates in 30 countries.
Nearly 200 specialists are deployed through Algomarketing. £24 million in revenue last year. £30 million projected this year.
The spreadsheet Yomi used to vet his very first candidates still exists. It tracks every Algo who's ever worked with the company. Over 450 people across eight years.
The level of retention amongst both clients and team members tells the story. Most Algos stay with the company for years.
The most surprising part for Yomi? All of it.
"This started off as a side hustle. Something I could do on the side while still working. I wasn't expecting it would become such a global organization with Algos working across 30 different countries across the globe. All remote."
This was never the plan. This was something he did while dispatching food deliveries from Google bathrooms, occasionally driving jollof rice around in a Jaguar.
What makes him proudest isn't the revenue, it's the life trajectories that have changed:
"How much we've helped elevate people's careers. Given so many people that opportunity of working with innovative companies. Helping people uplevel their CV and their career trajectory by coming through Algo."
Algos have become senior directors at Fortune 500 companies. Others have started their own businesses.
The culture at Algomarketing is unusual. They talk about the end of the relationship from day one.
"When someone starts at Algo, we actually start to talk about the end of the journey. Most companies hide the fact that you're not going to be there forever, right? Why not talk about the end of your tenure from the start, so there's that agreement on how much you need to have grown? That's where the person's success factor is."
Imagine that. A company that cares about how you’ll grow while you’re there just as much as it cares about what you can do for clients.
From Individuals to Nations
Yomi envisions trying to solve this same problem, but on an even larger scale:
"In the next five years, we're looking to be a platform through which nations can transform. Countries need their workforces to become more AI-native and AI-efficient to compete globally. But education systems can't move fast enough."
Skills are changing faster than institutions can adapt.
According to the World Economic Forum, 39% of key skills will change by 2030. The skills required for AI-exposed jobs are already changing 66% faster than other roles, up from 25% just last year.
The gap between what schools teach and what the economy needs widens every quarter.
The students graduating today were taught on frameworks from 2020. And the jobs they're applying for require capabilities that emerged in just the last couple years. The mismatch is structural.
"The education system isn't geared towards it. So we're building the platform through which governments and institutions can transform their entire workforce."
The goal is to impact real workforce outcomes like unemployment rates and displacement rates. Helping to ensure nations don’t get left behind in the emerging AI era.
Ultimately, it’s about building new doorways to allow good people the access and tools they need to be able to positively impact the systems they care about.
In many ways, it’s the same problem Yomi was solving at age 22. Just scaled up to the international level.
Yomi's not waiting for education systems to catch up. He's building the infrastructure they'll need when they're ready.
The Door Stays Open
Fifty rejections from Google.
One side entrance through a friend's referral.
One "we need more Yomis" conversation.
One weekend building a website and calling his mum.
One perfectly onboarded placement that proved the model worked.
Now 450 Algos over eight years. Most of them still work there.
The systems were wrong about Yomi. They're wrong about a lot of people.
Algomarketing exists to prove it.
