Happy Birthday Joblift! A big thank you for 5 wonderful years of innovation in digital recruiting.
Who is Joblift? We are an innovative, data-driven online platform for jobs. We work continuously to personalise the job search for individuals by filtering the suitable jobs from millions of available jobs globally, all of which is seamless and fully automated.
Our mission is to develop and continually optimise a recommendation platform based on artificial intelligence in order to become the first point of contact for job seekers worldwide.
Founded in May 2015, we have seen the recruiting market change and evolve, but so have we. When we were founded we were called “Everyjob” – created with the aim of showing every job online (metasearch).
Lets fast forward 5 years and we are now on our way to becoming THE digital career advisor for everyone…
In celebration of the occasion we sat down with our CEO Lukas Erlebach to discuss the journey so far:
Why did you choose to be part of Joblift?
Good question! My motives were on the one hand the opportunities that I saw within the market, then on the other hand the opportunity to build a software-based product with many smart colleagues and to bring it to market with an efficient team and contributing my knowledge here.
To explain this a little more: I found the market – HR-Tech – extremely exciting, because I had the impression that tech-driven innovation had not yet shaped the Talent Attraction market enough as well as the fact that the industry is huge and growing exponentially. Many problems still exist within the market such as matching, skills shortages and demographic changes and are still completely unsolved and that is what really motivates me. My previous role was at Zalando (e-commerce retailer), I saw how you can change an industry with a focus on execution and data / tech, and with this knowledge and inspiration I joined Joblift in early 2016.
What was the mission? What is the mission?
Building on the opportunity that we saw on the market and especially in Germany, we looked at the landscape of players at that time and understood the problems as well as pain points for both job seekers and recruiters.
Looking at it from a job seekers perspective, the questions raised was “Where can I find a job that really corresponds to my wishes and skills, in which I can develop my career and that also meets other criteria, without having to complete a 45-minute questionnaire beforehand?”.
Then looking from a recruiters perspective, the same was true: either they struggle with the problem of not receiving any applications or far too many unqualified/unsuitable people, both of which are equally bad.
This enabled us to see there was a clear vacuum for a player who, based on technology, breaks down job seeker profiles into their individual parts and understands the needs and possibilities of job seekers based on data. Previously, our mission was to build an intelligent platform that would take job seekers by the hand and guide them through the sometimes stressful process. The benchmark we had in the industry at the time was (and still is for the most part) job-title based searches and we said from the start that we wanted to revolutionise this search process. Over time, this has developed more and more holistically and we now dream of developing a digital career coach for job seekers around the world. We want to be the technology-based solution and the go-to destination for a candidate when searching jobs, really understanding career aspirations and becoming the platform of choice.
What does the name “Joblift” mean in your words?
For me, the name reflects our vision: We want to support job seekers in their careers. We not only want to help them find the next job, but also to be their career companion in the long term and to help people take great career paths that suit them. I find “Lift” particularly suitable because, of course, it symbolizes a very obvious (especially carefree) ascent in German, in English it also contains in my view, only positive associations, such as building up. For me and my employees, our brand also symbolizes the aspect of tackling and rolling up our sleeves, evolving our service and product every day which enables us to reduce the daily stress of many job seekers.
Where do you think we will be in 2-3 years? What are the goals?
After the Series B, we made a conscious decision not to grow horizontally but vertically. Specifically, this means that we want to get deeper into the value chains in our existing markets, work more closely with our existing customers and become the go-to platform for many job seekers.
We also want to take a decisive step forward in the next few years, which means getting closer to customers and their problems. We have strengthened our team accordingly and are now ready to stir up the market with a revolutionary performance-based product.
We are convinced that there will also be a kind of paradigm shift within the European market over the next few years, away from duration-based job advertisements to performance-based. “CPA” is the most prominent KPI that symbolises the performance-based area in recruiting. Our skills as a company include the fusion of tech, data and business execution which leaves us very well positioned to implement this concept.
We are extremely excited and if we look back in 3 years and in some industries recruiters from companies can no longer get past us “because we are too good to be ignored”, then we have been successful in my opinion.