A Top-Rated Digital Headhunter, Carving a Niche: Jobilla

“We have a firm belief to be able to change the market and to be number one in the world.”

Jobilla is a Finland-based developer of recruitment software, designed to offer employment services. The company targets hiring channels to reach the right audience and attract candidates, thereby enabling passive job seekers to show interest in open positions. It operates worldwide.

Jobilla is fully tailorable regardless of country, industry, position, or language.

The company was founded in 2015.

The Silicon Review reached out to Henri Nordström, co-founder and CEO of Jobilla, who spoke about how the company is making a difference in this segment and leading the pack from the front. Below is an excerpt.

Head to Head with Henri Nordström, Co-Founder & CEO

Q. From your perspective, how is the industry you serve currently evolving? And what are the trends in the different categories?

Although the labour market has changed from a scarcity of jobs to a scarcity of talent, the standard in the recruitment industry has not changed much. It is still based on the assumption that there will be plenty of applications as long as a vacancy opens up. This may be one of the reasons why recruitment processes have not evolved nearly as much as they could have, given the potential of digitalization and social media, for example. These old-fashioned dysfunctional ways to recruit are being used even though the majority of companies already have difficulties in hiring skillful people, and they are already very aware that something should be done. But, since they don't know any alternative ways to recruit, many think they don't have a choice.

The traditional recruitment processes are still built to make recruiters' lives as easy as possible, even though it will be crucial for the companies to put the candidate experience first. People today are less patient and expect things to happen quickly and easily. They use their mobile phones instead of computers and don't want to spend hours applying for something. Therefore, applying should be made for them as easy as possible. To put it in different words, would you update your CV or fill in a traditional job application on your mobile phone?

Another problem nowadays is, if you already have a job, you're not likely to look for a new job. Therefore, people don't go to job boards and the time and effort people are ready to use to apply is even less. In recruiting, we need to be where the people are: in social media.

When recruiting passive candidates, the employers are facing a whole new situation: you have to approach your candidate differently. Traditionally the employer could pick the best out of many good candidates. All of a sudden it is not the candidate, who is looking for a job, but it's the employers, who are looking for qualified people to come to work for them. This means the employer meets the candidate on the same eye level and has to sell themselves as an employer to the candidate. Many employers are not prepared for this and the current recruitment processes don't support this situation either.

HR technology is far behind many other markets in the level of innovation. Currently, only a fraction of the technological potential has been used in the industry. The good thing is that there are constantly more advanced technologies available for small companies. The wide range of different services and highly abstracted technology help us to realise innovations and develop our new smart solutions. This gives us a chance to drive change and outsize our impact even though we are not a giant in our industry.

Q. Where does Jobilla stand at the moment relative to other participants in the industry?

Jobilla's entire recruitment process is designed to hire people in a candidate-friendly way. At the moment our customers get on average seven times more candidates than with traditional methods. We are growing fast, after only six years, we are recruiting in 48 countries and are the leading recruitment marketing software in Europe based on how satisfied our customers are with their G2 reviews. We have a firm belief to be able to change the market and to be number one in the world.

Our whole concept and software is developed by us. We founded Jobilla, when we as entrepreneurs got tired of how difficult it was to try to find good skillful people to work for us and that every solution that was out there was either far too expensive or inefficient in finding and hiring qualified candidates. At first, we were a successful job board, but we soon saw that even though it was working well as a job board, the concept itself couldn't solve the problems we wanted to solve. So we changed everything. This is why the way we help companies to recruit is completely new and innovative and there is nothing like it at the moment in the market.

Q. How does Jobilla make digital recruiting effective?

Jobilla helps its customers to create an application process that is optimized for both the candidate and the recruiter. We use social media and technology to help the recruiters to reach, attract, activate and hire the candidates.

Since hiring passive candidates is very different from hiring active job seekers, it is important that the recruiters are not left alone with nice software and wished good luck. We consider ourselves as SaaS, software, and a service. This means we help companies to fix their recruitment process to hire successfully themselves. We are a fraction of the price of a headhunter, making it possible to work with us sustainably on a long-term basis. At its best, recruitment should and can be fun. That has always been our goal and for many of our customers, this already is the case too.

Q. Jobilla's complete recruitment solution makes it easy and fast to find and hire employees for any position. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit more?

The candidates don’t need to make any effort to approach the company. They can apply in less than three minutes and the recruiter gets the candidates automatically categorized based on their potential for the position in our software. Our software is free for everyone.

Our process takes into consideration people's changed attitudes towards cumbersome processes and the changed devices we use in our daily lives. Our process is designed to hire from the pool of active and passive candidates. This increases the quantity and the quality of potential candidates significantly.

Q. Is there anything else you want us to highlight that we might have missed?

We as entrepreneurs are really happy to see that we have been able to develop a solution that works, to bring change to the recruitment market for the better in the future.

Leadership | Jobilla

Henri Nordström, co-founder, is known as a warm-hearted and determined CEO. Despite his young age, 32, he is an experienced investor and an entrepreneur by lifestyle, having previously been involved in the insurance business. During his time as the CEO, Jobilla’s revenue has more than doubled every year.

Tommi Siro, co-founder, serves as the Chief Growth Officer of Jobilla.

Pekka Nebelung serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Jobilla.

Janne Rotko, serves as the Chief Product Officer of Jobilla.

“We use social media and technology to help the recruiters to reach, attract, activate and hire the candidates.”