My name is Dmytro Gryn, and I’m the CEO of Jooble, Job Aggregator, an international job search website that works in 69 countries. Jooble operates as a classic job search site in Ukraine and Hungary, and in other countries — as an aggregator.
We are a remote-first company and believe people can create cool projects from anywhere in the world. Our main task is that every person can find a job quickly and easily. And I will share the story of how we do this.
My Path
I joined Jooble in 2007. At that time I was a student at the National Technical University of Ukraine, “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, where I studied Computer Science. My path at Jooble began as a Software Engineer, and in practice, I was the third employee — two first were Jooble founders. In more than 15 years in the company, I changed different positions and gained a managerial one — now I am the CEO of the core business.
On my way to the position of CEO, I have been doing lots of different work. For instance, I was the person to lead the international scaling of Jooble to foreign online recruitment markets, created and controlled all the necessary processes, and assembled and trained a team. Generally, I tried at Jooble my hand at product development, engineering, managing teams, and being CTO.
Now my work priorities as CEO have somehow changed — I focus less on the operational tasks and more on the improvement of the company’s capability to create more value for Jooble clients.
About Jooble
Jooble is an international job search site that works in 69 countries and is used daily by millions of job seekers. The company has been operating since 2006. Jooble is a Ukrainian company that works as an aggregator in almost all countries of work.
Aggregator collects all available vacancies from various sources (job boards, corporate websites, ads, social networks) and allows users to find work on one page among all job openings with more than 140 thousand resources. Jooble is in the top 500 most visited sites in the world.
According to SimilarWeb, in the Jobs And Employment segment, Jooble is among the TOP-10 websites in terms of traffic worldwide.
As a Ukrainian company, Jooble shut down its business in the labor markets of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. However, the website continued to operate for a different purpose: to spread the truth about Russian military aggression (assisted by Belarus) against Ukraine.
Recently, the company launched Jooble Job Search mobile app for iOS and Android. The application will allow users to search for work in several regions and professions simultaneously. In addition, it is possible to search for vacancies in a specific country that involve working remotely.
In addition, it is possible to set notifications to receive regular news of new job openings. The job seeker can respond to the ad immediately in the application or forward the vacancy to the desired messenger. The main goal of the mobile application is to make the job search even more convenient and faster for the user.
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Launching Jooble
Jooble was founded by two students from Ukraine, Roman Prokofiev, and Eugene Sobakarev. They met while studying at Kherson’s physical and technical academy and later joined KPI. From the first year, they started working: Roman – in a small (at that time) product company, Eugene – in an outsourcing company.
The idea to create Jooble came to friends in 2006. Roman already had his own small company then and spent a lot of time looking for employees.
“Employment sites were very inconvenient, and I could spend 2-3 hours to find the necessary resume. I asked Eugene to help me make an aggregator find people because it takes a terrible amount of time,” says Roman.
Soon, the Jooble site was born in the KPI dormitory, which differed from other employment sites in that the employer paid not for posting a job but for the number of clicks on it. Initially, the service was launched in Ukraine. As of 2010, the service was available in 24 countries.
In many developing countries, Jooble gained a foothold, and now the company is trying to take a better position in Western countries, mainly English-speaking countries. Jooble currently has over 500 employees. Since 2021, the company has started hiring employees on a remote basis.
Since our company operates in 69 countries, Jooble also employs experts in rare foreign languages – from Portuguese and Norwegian to Indonesian and Japanese, because the company needs to cooperate with customers from dozens of countries and understand their labor market well.
Our Mission at Jooble
We create a world where every person throughout their life has the opportunity to find a job that corresponds to their life aspirations and creates conditions for a sense of inherent value.
When every person can find a job with the help of our service within a day, we will be satisfied, because we have changed something.
Jooble also works to ensure the safety of job seekers, so they end up with proven companies with good reputations.
It will be very cool if a person can find a job and not just a job, but what we understand as a normal company where they won’t be fired. We see it as our contribution to the development of the economy of that country.
How We Became the Remote-First Company
Over the past few years, we have experienced many changes in the labor market during COVID-19, which has reformatted most companies for remote work. Previously, the company founders believed that all processes are faster and easier in a shared workspace. Quarantine has shown that teams can function effectively no matter where they are.
But, on the other hand, changing all processes under remote hiring made it very easy for us to work now. Although Jooble operates in 69 countries, the main office and most employees are in Ukraine. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we managed to continue working remotely and hire employees from all over the world, thanks to the earlier restructuring of all processes.
Our Team: How We Hire and How We Relax
The hiring process at Jooble is exciting and has several stages: an hour-long interview, where the applicant’s competencies are checked. Subsequently, a test task or technical interview is possible depending on the position. In the final stage, the interview is conducted by one of the founders of the company or a top manager.
A newcomer with an offer receives a link to a guide with information about the company, internal rules, culture, bonuses, and opportunities. The team celebrated various events, organized team building, and held themed corporate parties. And once a quarter, there was a birthday party — themed parties in honor of people who celebrated their birthdays at this time.
Since the beginning of the full-scale war, most members have worked remotely from different cities in Ukraine and other countries. During the war, the company continues to pay salaries, hire new people, and support employees in dire straits.
Creating the Product Ecosystem
As Jooble’s core business scaled and became successful, the question arose: what next? Over the years of its existence, the company has developed a vision that Jooble helps people realize themselves professionally at all stages of life.
It follows that we need to launch new products and businesses in this field. Therefore, in 2022, we launched the Jooble Venture Lab. This is a new business unit that works in two directions: startup studio and strategic partnerships
We want to co-found international tech-driven startups in recruitment, employment, and professional education within the startup studio. Our team is engaged in researching promising markets and ideas in this domain. Also, we are looking for talented entrepreneurs and co-founders who are ready to lead new startups.
How do we work with new products? After confirming the idea at the prototype level, Jooble’s corporate venture fund invests in the project (pre-seed, seed rounds). The amount of investment depends on the stage and needs of a specific project according to the business plan. We want to bring more than ten projects through incubation per year, investing in each at different stages from $100,000 to $2 million.
The second vector of Jooble Venture Lab is strategic partnerships. We are interested in partnerships with early-stage industry startups as a strategic venture investor. We want to integrate promising, innovative projects in the job search and career-building field into the Jooble ecosystem to deliver on our promise – to help people find work they love as much as possible.
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Future Plans for Jooble
We are planning to become a “point of entry,” which will offer the best choice and offer of career opportunities for a person, based on his existing skills and abilities, and those that would be relevant to acquire in the near future, cultural and personal beliefs, values and life needs. In other words, we are gradually increasing the number of dimensions by which we select relevant vacancies for job seekers.
