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The job space is ripe for a good disruption. Monster has been one of the kings of the industry for quite some time. A new startup in Sweden is looking to innovate in the job space. Jobylon’s founders want to simplify the job seeking process while allowing job hunters more options to connect with employers over things that could matter when looking for their next career.
Jobylon integrates social media, job bounties, and the cultural component of the job search to become a “one stop shop” of sorts for job hunters.
We got to interview Jobylon CEO Aref Abedi who tells us how Jobylon is different than any other job site out there. He also talks to us about Sweden’s startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem. Check out the interview below:
What is Jobylon?
Searching for a job or your next employer can be extremely time consuming. You spend hours in front of the computer, Googling and searching through a number of sources in order to answer the question “What’s the best job for me?” In the end, you might still be far away from your goal and overwhelmed by all the information.
By automatically gathering and summarising relevant information about the most attractive employers and their jobs at one place, Jobylon becomes a valuable “one-stop-shop” for those who want to boost their career. Jobylon also has integrations with the largest social networks which in turn results in a number of great features, amongst others; seeing where your friends work, contacting them and automatically matching your profile to the most relevant available positions.Jobylon also provides the possibility for employers to set Bounty’s (Finders Fees) on admired and specific positions. By using the power of crowd sourcing and social media, we help employers find pre-qualified candidates and at the same time reward people for their valuable networks. It’s not an unknown fact that one of the most successful ways to find top talent is through referrals, we want to automate and boost this! (Recommendations can be made through our site and our Facebook App https://apps.facebook.com/jobylon .E.g. Let’s say you want to work within sales and you find this traineeship. You find the job interesting but you want to know more about the company. How’s the culture? What are the recent news about the company and how many people work there? Do I know anyone in my network who has been working there? I would like to set up a lunch with him/her to better understand if this is something for me.All of these things and more can be done through Jobylon! We want to make the job seeking process extremely simple and fun/social at the same time.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds
One of the main founders of Jobylon is Jorn Lyseggen (Founder & CEO of Meltwater Group).Melwater Group is a news and social media intelligence company. Meltwater is a Norwegian software company founded in Oslo in 2001. The company is entirely bootstrapped with a start capital of $15,000, it has never raised capital and is entirely employee owned. Meltwater is currently serving more than 20,000 corporate clients through 57 offices located across North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.About Jorn Lyseggen
- Founder of Meltwater Group, GenKey, Jobylon, and MEST
- Previously the CEO of Mogul Group, a public 400 man Scandinavian IT consulting firm
- Two previous tech start-ups, one sold and one shelved
- Korean born. Norwegian raised
The teamThe team consists of 5 dedicated Jobylonians:Aref Abedi | CEO of JobylonPreviously running and heading the Meltwater office in Amsterdam as the Managing DirectorMarco Garbelini – TechPreviously working for Bwin and the government of MozambiqueNiklas Emanuelsson – TechPreviously working as a freelancer and for NDS in LondonThomas Backlund – TechPreviously working as a freelancer and consultantElina Aziz – Client Relations and SalesGraduate from Stockholms university with a major in marketing
Where are you based?
Jobylon is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
What is the startup culture like where you are based?
Sweden has ‘the most digitally connected economy in the world’, and a global mindset when it comes to developing innovative tech startups.The startup culture in Stockholm is simply great, with successful startups booming everywhere. From “veterans” such as Skype, Spotify and Pricerunner to new hot startups such as Wrapp and iZettle.
What problem does Jobylon solve?
Our startup aims to solve two major problems.
- For the active job seekers: We gather all information about vacant jobs and employers in one place – Relevant and needed information when searching for jobs are scattered throughout the web and it’s very time consuming and inefficient to search for jobs and get to know your future employers.
- For passive job seekers: Through our Finders’ Fee concept (Jobylon Bounty) we manage to target the passive candidates that are extremely difficult to find. By assigning rewards on specific jobs and utilizing the power of crowdsourcing we push out Bounty jobs through our social infrastructure and target the people who in turn might know the wanted candidate.
In the end, the recruitment industry is currently going through a paradigm shift, driven by social media and technology innovation. For the last decade, the biggest change that has occurred are job ads slowly moving from print media and becoming searchable on the web. Jobylon’s aim is to disrupt the recruitment market and completely change how people find jobs (or how jobs find them)
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Ironic enough, the biggest challenge has been recruiting the best talent that will help realize this vision. This is probably the case with many other startups. As long as you have a team that are not only skilled but contribute to the right culture, maintaining the momentum and always challenges the next step, the sky Is the limit.I’m happy to say that we now have that team and all of them has been recruited through referrals ☺
Who are your mentors and role models?
In many ways, our mentors and role models are any other successful startup out there. It’s always inspiring seeing a small team, building a great service that slowly (many times rapidly) changes the market and completely innovates the industry.
Whats one thing the world doesn’t know about you or your startup?
Currently, I would say there a lot of things the world doesn’t know about Jobylon but that is of course about to change ☺ We aim to create the best service on the market and disrupt the industry.
What’s next for your Jobylon?
We just released a new major update for our sites (Jobylon.se and Jobylon.no). You can read about the update and the recent features in our latest blog postThe next step for us is to continue working with our Bounty concept. Currently, users can recommend jobs to their friends and earn money through the site but also through our Facebook App https://apps.facebook.com/jobylon.So far, Jobylon Bounty has been at a very early stage. Having said that, we’ve already had around 40 bounties out on the site, with a total amount of almost 1 000 000 SEK/NOK for people to collect. Around a dozen of these have led to hires, from account managers to senior engineers; all have been passive candidates who have not actively been looking for a job. But when recommended by a friend, they found it interesting and it led to a hire!We cant give too much information about this but what can be said is that the Bounty concept will go through a huge and exciting development phase and the outcome will simply be amazing!During the last couple of months, we’ve gained a huge amount of knowledge when it comes to referral behaviors and best practices. All of these things will be put into action for our next release.
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