Creating a search engine that searches for jobs as easily and fast as Google finds information was the idea that sprung up in the minds of two Ukrainians, Roman Prokofiev and Yevgen Sobakaryov, back in 2006. They never thought Jooble, as they called the service, would become a profitable business with more than 800,000 daily users around the world.
The service essentially is an aggregator of job vacancies on the global labor market. By typing jooble.org in the web browser’s navigation bar, a list of more than 60 countries appears where Jooble collects job openings. After choosing a country, a job category or exact position is chosen before the service provides open vacancies.
As of July 24,Jooble occupies the 32nd spot in the SimilarWeb ranking of top 50 websites in the world for jobs and employment. The leader of this market is the American aggregator Indeed.com, which is why Jooble’s presence is weak in the U.S. The biggest client audience of Jooble comes from South America, Western Europe and Asia.
Ukrainians account for only 7 percent of the clientele and, as Prokofiev says, “Ukraine is not a very rich country for our service, so it would be very silly not to use all the opportunities for global expansion that the Internet gives.” Drivers, accountants, managers and some household work positions are the most popular search results in Ukraine’s Jooble.
The service started in the founders’ native country, however.
Both Prokofiev and Sobakaryov brought plenty of entrepreneurial experience to the table when starting Jooble. In 2003, Prokofiev started Teamsoft, a developer of software solutions for pharmaceutical companies. It was very hard to find good developers with knowledge of the pharmaceuticals market, Prokofiev recalls. So he approached Sobakaryov with an offer to develop an online service that would search for resumes on the Ukrainian job market.
They later developed the idea of making both resumes and vacancies searchable. They invested $50,000 of their own money into the development. Within a half a year the company broke even having achieved 3,000 users per day, but the first profit arrived only in 2008.
“We had no experience working on the Internet. So we basically spent two years and all the money we invested in self-learning and testing all the business models,” Prokofiev says.
When the economic crisis of 2008 hit, Prokofiev and Sobakaryov decided to close the resume search, and stick with vacancies because of much higher demand.
The move proved to be a successful one. Working solely with vacancies, Jooble expanded to Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Poland became the first European Union country Jooble entered.
Searches are free for job seekers. Local job boards that get orders for job candidates from companies pay Jooble a personalized custom fee per candidate that applies for a vacancy posted on Jooble. Prices range from $0.002 to $0.50 depending on the country. The second and smaller source of revenue is online advertising.
From a team of four people in 2006, Jooble has grown into a Kyiv office of more than 80 people. There are no other offices around the world.
“We have many partners and supporting platforms in each country where we provide services. That’s why we do not need to be physically present abroad,” Prokofiev says.
For every division of the service that works in a specific foreign country, there is a manager though, whose necessary prerequisite is having work and living experience in that country.
It takes around two months to adjust the search engine to the new country’s job market. But in the countries, where the language is harder, like Japan or China, the process of adjusting the service takes around six months.
Since job aggregators work according to the same scheme, it is hard to somehow stand out and outrun competitors in a specific way. But Prokofiev says that concentrating on delivering high quality service is always the bait for making money and gaining competitive advantages.
Kyiv Post staff writer BozhenaSheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
