Yahoy!

The long wait has finally come to an end. Jobium is proud to present its first public service. THE service is a combination of creating awesome looking e-mail job applications and tracking when they are opened or otherwise managed.

The application creation is made as simple for the job seeker as possible. By entering career information, job seeker is directed to applicant customization where he/she can customize the application according to his/hers tastes with just few clicks.

After sending the application, THE service tracks all the activity happened in it. The applicant receives a notification to his/hers Facebook account and/or e-mail whenever someone looks, clicks or does anything else to the application.

“Many of my friends have complained that informing about the ongoing recruitment process has been really poor by employers. We want to give all the necessary tools to job seekers to stay on top of their own job search.” Says Erkka from Jobium.

The guys said that this is only the first step to enhance recruitment process comprehensively. This is closely related to their bigger project, the cloud based recruitment tool offered to companies. They didn’t yet reveal how these are connected, but promised to unveil the curtains as soon as the launch of the company project approaches.

We’ll stay tuned what’s going to happen!

Ps. Remember to sign up for THE service in www.jobium.com

Part (5/5) – Startup heat and Jobium

Sad but true: this is the last part of the blog series by guys from Jobium.

The last part will reflect the series so far into Jobium. Guys will talk how they are implementing the success elements they have been talking about and how they see their future. After this part, I, Jobium Dude, will again be in charge of reporting what is happening inside Jobium.

Boys, you are welcome.

Success elements in Jobium – Are there such?

We have talked about the importance of business orientation and both internal and external elements of success and reflected those to Finnish context. As Jobium Dude said, it is time to bring this whole case upon Jobium.

First, a frank confession: We have believed that all the stereotypes of those weird attitudes towards startup business we have presented in our series are the true case. These were such as idea, not problem-, oriented way of thinking, principle to hide our “precious idea” to the last bit, overvaluing the necessity of Venture Capital etc. Now we will explain how we are trying to implement the elements of success we have presented before.

Internal elements

We both consider ourselves as fast learners. But we have noticed that it is not enough. In order to be able to learn fast you need also to have the correct input. As in the parable of navigating in a large city, we needed to get up from our asses and go and ask from experienced people how to find a way to our destination. We had to do this because we did not know how to interpret our map.  We then went to potential customers and successful entrepreneurs and asked what we should learn in order to succeed. This information has been indisputably vital for us to perceive the important knowledge among all the useless data. This is what we mean by fast learning and we are trying to hasten this whole process all the time.

Before understanding the importance of asking for guidance in order to learn how to do right things, we were, simply put, engineers fascinated by our own idea. We had a product and a business model, which we had not been validated by any potential customer or successful entrepreneur.  After doing so, they both flew straight into trash bin and we started all over again. Now we are working on our alpha version, which is based on the information we have got from real functioning businesses. We have analyzed this information and summarized the core problem into four main points. Our alpha version is trying to solve the problem we have defined around these four points.

External elements

After starting to visit customers and entrepreneurs, we have constantly tried to build new connections with skilled people. We still consider a qualified and broad network is one of the most important elements for a startup, if not even the most important. We cannot learn fast without it, we cannot validate our solutions without it, we cannot get finance without it, we are in a much worse position trying to proceed to new markets without it etc. We have set a goal to be business ready in the early 2013. After this is again time to start slithering into big boys’ tables and start the validation and improvement process seriously.

We still find Finland as a rather poor place to create IT-solutions aiming to high growth. Therefore, we have done everything in English from the first day, even the internal messaging in our company. One of our interviewees gave us a very valid tip to always start competitor analysis and benchmarking from markets where the competition is fiercest. This drives you to create your business to compete with the best of the best. We checked more than hundred recruitment websites and -solutions from global and local markets benchmarking the best ones. We are not sure if it is enough, but definitely sure it has been extremely valuable.

Jobium in future

Hardcore demonstration to companies on December, sellable beta in early 2013, after that? Who knows. We acknowledge the difficulty of penetrating an existing market, especially one as highly competed field as ours. But based on our positive feedback from companies and the fact that professionals consider recruitment market to grow in the future, we believe a combination of latest technology and customer oriented service is able to grasp a share from the market. We are not setting our goal to conquer the world in two years but to acquire a solid position from the market and obtain a steady rate of (high) growth. Not until the first goal we are talking about changing the world ;)

Trying not to sound like some completely insane fools, we stand straight-backed behind the statement that this past year has been the most teachable and interesting in our lives. We truly hope to be able to create a healthy growing business. And we will promise Jobium Dude will keep you on track how we have managed in our venture.

Jobium over and out. Have a nice end of year 2012!