Earlier this month MyJobCompany announced a seed round fundraising from several business angel networks in order to bring its recruiting platform to Latin America. Founded in France in 2012, MyJobCompany is a recruitment platform that allows recruiters to post jobs, and ‘diffusers’ to share them with their network, allowing them to gain money as a result. The product has had a decent amount of success in France, but its success in LatAm has been phenomenal, with 5,000 registered headhunteres in Chile signed up (about 50% in the Chilean market) in the first 3 days, with 30,000 visits to the site itself.
Launching out of Chile, MyJobCompany has parnered up with the incubator 3ie, who has provided the group with cultural insights, as well as money (almost 1 euro for every 4 euros invested, or 100K+€ in funding). The company chose to pass on the Startup Chile program because they felt it was “not as prepared,” and they received more tailored help (legal, pr,etc.) from 3ie. 3ie is an incubator linked to one of Chile’s top technical universities, Unversidad Technica Federico Santa Maria.
I sat down with MyJobCompany’s head of Latin American Alexander Theis to talk about how MyJobCompany tackled the LatAM market, as it is not always easy for such a young company to launch into a new market, let along 2 (portuguese, spanish) as once. He told me that one of the biggest challenges was localisation and adaption for the LatAm markets. in addition to lowering prices (people are accustomed to pay more in France than in LatAm), they also had to change their message. In France, their main message is “you can make money” and then “help your fellow man;” however, Theis tells me that in Latin America, internet users don’t trust websites that tell you you can make money off of them, so the site had to dial that down, and focus on the human touch.
It seems that human touch has really paid off – MyJobCompany has been featured in CNN and 15 other newspapers, and is looking to continue growth this year.