Traditional Recruiting Is Slow And Doesn't Reach All the Best – Finnish Company Jobilla Develops Digital Headhunter Solution

Published in Talouselämä (Finnish Business Magazine) on 4/22/2021.

Recruitment startup Jobilla has received funding of nearly €1.5 million to grow in Germany and develop its AI-powered recruiting tool.

Recruiting is too slow for companies and it is hard to find the right candidates, says Henri Nordström, CEO of recruitment startup Jobilla.

Nordström has experienced this himself in his previous job as a branch manager at Fennia. To find suitable employees, he had to call people he knew and ask for references.

"I wondered if there wasn't a digital solution for that, because we had generally come so far with digitization in the 2020s."

The other two Jobilla founders had the same experience, and the trio set out to find the most effective way to make recruiting easier.

Thus was born Jobilla and its recruiting tool that targets job ads on social media to suitable candidates. Interested candidates can submit some sort of application with just a few clicks, and AI helps employers pick the most professionally suitable people. For both candidates and employers, the process of making contact is made immensely easier.

Jobilla was founded in 2015 and generated revenues of €1.9 million last year. Now the startup has received about EUR 1.5 million in growth funding from venture capitalists, as well as a EUR 700,000 corporate loan and support from Business Finland to accelerate its international growth. The funding round was led by Trind VC Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund.

Not All Top Applicants Will Be Reached by the Announcement

Nordström points out that many job announcements on job search boards do not reach applicants who are not actually actively looking for a new job. This means that a great many potential candidates are completely overlooked by recruiters, or they are not interested enough in the ad to apply.

According to Nordström, such potential candidates are looking for an easy way to contact companies. If they come across a job posting in their spare time on social media, it must be attractive enough. He describes Jobilla's recruiting approach as candidate-driven digital headhunting. This, he believes, is Jobilla's trump card in a highly competitive, 450 billion recruiting market.

According to Nordström, the Jobilla tool has been particularly successful in sectors such as healthcare, construction and IT, where there are many different job openings. According to him, the Jobilla tools have helped recruiters attract an average of seven times more applicants to jobs and cut hiring cycle time by 30% compared to the traditional method of filling out personal information, writing an open application and attaching a resume.

Jobilla's customers in Finland include Suunto, Securitas and Remax. Last year, the company also expanded its operations to Germany and the United States. In total, the company has 150 foreign customers, including the German Red Cross and Arkansas State Hospitals in the United States.

Growth in Germany

Jobilla employs nearly 50 people, both in-house and through subcontractors. Most of them are in Finland, ten in Germany, one representative in the United States and some employees around the world.

With the funds raised, Jobilla plans to grow its business, especially in the German-speaking market, and further develop the AI capabilities of its system.

According to Nordström, Jobilla has already generated 1 million euros in sales this year. Most of the growth is now coming from Germany.

"Since the beginning of the year, Germany has accounted for 25-35% of our sales." Nordström expects Jobilla's sales to increase to more than four million euros this year.