Jobful

Business story

Jobful is a Romanian start-up, launched in May 2018, offering recruitment solutions for employers. Jobful Career Platform is an end-to-end customizable and gamified SaaS Solution that helps companies to attract, engage, upskill and hire the right professionals. Jobful Career Platform connects sourcing channels and other 3rd party systems to assure the format of an one-stop-shop for talent acquisition.

Based on our initial research, recruitment is the most obsolete dimension that works in the very old mantra of demand and supply leveraged by the “traffic” of resumes.

The opportunity we discovered is to build the technology that can transform the recruitment process into a connection process and facilitate better experiences and improve the business process.

Business Mission / Concept

VISION

Inspire and fulfil people’s potential to shape the future of a multigenerational workforce.

MISSION

Our mission is to provide an interactive, equitable, and effective way of matching talent with the right opportunities for them. 

We believe that everyone deserves a workplace where they are happy & productive, and each business deserves performing & engaged employees. We are here to facilitate this connection through future facing technology and human focused design. 

CONTEXT

The success of a startup depends on multiple factors and variables. We know that 9 out of 10 startups close their business within the first 2 years of existence. Many studies were conducted in order to understand why, and what makes some startups successful. Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross conducted a study analysing 5 key dimensions of startups and presented it at TEDx .

When we discuss timing, the most important metric, we look at the entire context, present and future, of tech HR startups. In our case, we look more specifically at generational changes, the impact of technology in our everyday lives, the future of jobs and market trends.

Generational changes

Millennials and Gen Z currently account for 38% of the global workforce, but are set to reach 58% within a decade. These generational cohorts grew up close to technology, changed jobs more often, are better educated and earn more than any previous generation. They are reshaping the workforce, reskilling, working remotely and embracing freelancing, driving changes in how we work every day.

Technology impact

The products the tech giants are focusing on, especially in the B2C area,are products that build and improve focus on the ability to grab and keep users’ attention. Having these close to perfect products all around us drives a constant and precise critique on business products and the interactions with them, as these were often built with the business process in mind instead of the end-user. 

In our view, the key to success is closing this gap, and so we built Jobful with the end-user in mind and with attractive systems able to compete with any other products, always grabbing their attention.

The Future of Jobs

The World Economic Forum has been conducting complex studies on "The future of jobs" These are the keys takeaways:

•The pace of technology adoption is expected to remain unabated and may accelerate in some areas;

•Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a 'double-disruption' scenario for workers;

•Skills gaps continue to be high as in-demand skills across jobs change in the next five years.

Thus, creating a more agile workforce, able to reskill, upskill and adapt is not the only key, but it's critical for the good of workers and our economies.

Market trends

When we look at education and career, we can easily observe changes and trends around us. The most relevant for our context are:

•Growth in massive open online courses (Coursera, edX, Lynda, etc.);

•Increase the pace of digital adoption for business processes;

•Use of AI / ML to improve business outcome;

•User-centric systems for fast adoption and engagement.

Building our business and product, we started with each of these trends as indicators for market direction and success catalysts.

Recession, layoffs and increased dynamic

The current outlook of the labour market opens a land of opportunity for our technology. The Wall Street Journal compared the current context of a potential recession with the previously experienced ones in the US. Based on the number of unfilled jobs, retirement of baby boomers (generation) and other metrics, one of the aspects making this potential recession unique is the dynamic of the jobs market and the potential recovery.

Business highlights & achievements 

During the last 4 years, the team was part of various startup Acceleration Programs. Here are our proudest achievements:

•In 2018 attended the Spherik by KPMG Acceleration Program and obtained 3rd Place & Popularity Prize at Startarium. 

•In 2019 we graduated from the SAP.io Berlin Acceleration Program;

•In 2020 we graduated from NUMA (WEVE) New York Acceleration Program, while in 2021 we completed InnovX Scale-up Acceleration Program and participated to Romanian Shark Tank.

•In 2022, we were selected by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development for the Star Venture program, offering expert consultancy for key development projects. When the Ukraine-Russia war started, we put our platform to support the displaced people from Ukraine to regain their financial stability, with the support of ERSTE-BCR Bank (https://jobs4ukr.com).

As investment results, in 2019 we have received our first Angel investment round of 100K EUR, which was followed by an additional 600.000 EUR in subsequent investments rounds.

We managed to build strategic partnerships with technology companies (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and AWS) and financial institutions (BCR / ERSTE and EBRD).

Product / service

From the B2B perspective, our solution offers four dimensions to improve talent acquisition.

Build and grow your talent pool

Jobful Career Platform is a SaaS solution, connecting sourcing channels and ATS systems as a customer's career website. The product is fully customizable based on the customer's brand book to fit perfectly within your current ecosystem.

Generate qualified shortlists in clicks

On average, 60% of a recruiter’s time is spent on pre-screening, going from one CV to another. Moreover, recruiters spend less than 10 seconds on a CV deciding if it’s worth further exploring or not. 

We built custom Artificial Intelligence algorithms to generate best-fit candidates within seconds, eliminating pre-screening and offering recruiters more time to focus on qualifying candidates.

Upskill top candidates for a perfect fit

Based on the PwC Survey, 77% of CEOs consider the lack of key skills as one of the biggest threats for their business. The World Economic Forum stated in 2019 that talent, not technology, is the key to success in a digital future. 

Jobful offers a dedicated course framework, supporting organizations to grow their talent pool's skill set based on current and future needs.

Engage talent using technology

We built a custom gamification framework, tapping into people’s motivators and automated touchpoints, transforming recruitment into an engaging experience instead of a burden, guiding both the candidates and the recruiters into a meaningful and enriching experience. 

Business Model

Our portfolio includes four use cases of the same technology, defined as solutions. These are: Corporates, Universities (Career Centers), NGOs (focused on employment - Jobs4Ukraine) and Talent Communities (job boards, recruitment agencies, RPOs and personnel leasing).

All our use cases are commercialized in a Software as a Service model (monthly subscription). The offering covers support, maintenance, hosting, updates, and upgrades. We have connected offerings for customizations, premium support and consultancy for clients.

The commercial changed in 2021 from a local approach on the Romanian market to a regional and global approach. The strategy is built on four layers, starting with inbound - dedicated content for organic growth in SEO and lead generation systems on our blog and continuing with outbound using LinkedIn Navigator for contacts and automated email flows. These two first pillars generate leads in the mid-market. 

We’re now partnering with SAP (AppCenter), Microsoft (Marketplace) and Oracle to drive new business in the large enterprise sector. Finally, we have a dedicated sales team conducting our process for closing new business and a dedicated account manager for key accounts.

Market Highlights

Total Addressable Market

The global talent acquisition, staffing technology, and services market is forecasted to reach approximately $ 196 Bn in 2028. The talent acquisition, staffing technology, and services market is accountable worldwide for around 13% stake of the global human capital management market. 

Serviceable Available Market

The holistic approach used by Jobful alongside the partnership frameworks allows the startup to address more than 40% of the market which means approximately $ 56.28 Bn. The internet platforms are projected to account for more than 50% of the worldwide market for staffing software and talent acquisition in the coming years. As Jobful is such a platform we estimated that 40% is a realistic market dimension (being the first market targeted by Jobful).

Serviceable Obtainable Market

The market which can be obtained by Jobful according to the current success rate and based on our customer segmentation represents up to 12% of SAM within the following next 10 years. The 12% of SAM is again a conservative approach of Jobful and it resulted from the fact that at the beginning our products will be adopted by innovators (2.5% according to scientific literature) and early adopters (13.5% according to scientific literature).

Competition

In order to understand the competition we started from market approaches, categories of actions that our target customers do and have been doing. The approaches are:

The most competitive and direct competition is with the digitization approach. In this category, we have legacy solutions (SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Taleo, Workday), challenges in enterprise space (GreenHouse) and challenges in the mid market (Recruitee, Team Tailor). 

Our strategy includes the already agreed partnerships with legacy solutions to expand their functionalities and secure the risk of churn. 

Business traction

Jobful reached 150K (euro) in annual recurring revenue and is now averaging 60K new recurring business each quarter. This amount each quarter is adding between 2 and 4 new logos to our portfolio, mostly in corporate and university space. The current active pipeline is above 600K and the solution has a high degree of “stickiness” (mout), not registering any churn over the last year.

The main objective for this financing round is to support our growth and have the capacity to implement our strategy which targets 400% YoY growth for 2023.

Goals & future roadmap 

The roadmap includes: invest in marketing lead generation system (marketing budgets for B2B, inbound and outbound), test new marketing campaigns outside Romania for the two new use cases (Campus and NGOs), increase the headcount of the sales team, close our Seed round (~500K strategic investor) and grow our international portfolio (>50% of the bookings and active pipeline outside Romania).

Pitch and AMA Session

If you would like to get to know more about Jobful, take a look at this Pitch and AMA session recording, where Mihai, the co-founder, goes through the business model and answers many questions coming from our community of potential investors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKL077TfsCQ&t=4s

Latest Updates

• Going live with two new enterprise customers and one University by end of May

• 50K grant to develop accessibility features and implement our technology for NGOs

• First quarter above 100K in revenue

• 75% of the current revenue secured as recurring

• Core team doubled in size

• Overpass 2022’s year budget by end of May

• Targeting 300%+ growth year of year with an active pipeline over 0.5M EUR

• Launching new interface (frontend 3.0) and new modules (reporting, employee document management)

• Actively building an amazing advisory board

• Secured 100K+ on Ronin campaign

Social links:

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/jobfulro

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jobfulplayground/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jobful/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jobful1229