HRTech Interview with Henri Nordström, CEO at Jobilla

Henri Nordström, CEO at Jobilla comments more on why the entire recruitment process today needs a total overhaul while discussing the latest in AI powered HRtech in this interview:

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Hi Henri, tell us about yourself and more about Jobilla. 

I have been an entrepreneur for 15 years. I became passionate about solving challenges in the recruitment industry because, in my previous company, I really struggled to find great candidates for my recruitment using any services available. At the same time, I found my wife using the internet and started wondering how it is possible to find your life partner easier from the internet than from a single matching employee.

Jobilla started with a realization that the best candidates are not actively looking for a job. We realized that if we wanted to attract these candidates the entire recruitment funnel needed to be reinvented.

1. Instead of people needing to look for jobs, we started using advertisement methods that take the jobs to the right target groups even though they are not actively looking.
2. Instead of asking the candidate to spend hours filling out a job application, we created a simple process where the candidate could test their suitability for the job in less than 3 minutes.
3. Instead of asking the recruiter to review candidates one by one, we created an algorithm that automatically categorized the candidates based on their potential for the job.

After we found our model, we have been scaling really fast, from a local Finnish company generating a couple of hundreds of thousands of euros in revenue to an over 10M€ revenue a year corporation, with Germany becoming our largest market.

We’d love to hear more about some of your recent AI-powered tools and enhancements and how it will benefit end users?

We are currently developing nine different AI solutions that we will bring to market in the following two years. The end goal is to create a fully automated recruitment advertising platform that automatically generates an optimized talent acquisition funnel for each position that the customer is looking for. This funnel is linked directly to the ATS or HR system the customer is using, and we already support more than 65 of the most used ATS systems in Europe.

Our Talent Insight AI tool, launched last week, is our first fully operational commercial launch. The tool predicts the recruitment difficulty and suggests the right recruitment method to match the difficulty level.

Our core business, now an AI-supported Talent Acquisition Funnel and, in the future, a fully automated funnel, is linked to this system. In the near future, recruiters need to define only what kind of candidate they are looking for, and our tool creates a Talent Acquisition Campaign optimized exactly for this target group.

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How are you seeing AI influence the current global HRtech landscape?

AI is already changing the HRTech industry, but we have seen only the tip of the iceberg. AI will dramatically impact all aspects of HRTech during the next couple of years. Now, we have seen “cool new features” that already add value, but we have not yet seen complete game-changing products that completely change how these industries operate. In the near future, we are going to see exactly that. There will be a similar revolution happening in this industry, as we, for example, saw in the taxi industry when Uber entered the market.

In the talent acquisition space, the industry needs global solutions that can predictably help companies hire talent cost-effectively. This will change when the core processes related to talent acquisition will be automated. Every company will be able to get their jobs advertised to exactly the right target audiences, and the processes will be so easy and fun for the candidates that the friction that we now see in job application processes in basically all companies will no longer be a bottleneck for finding the right talent.

For technology brands and other players across varied industries who have regular global hiring needs besides language localization, what else can help drive a better hiring cycle?

The largest challenge for global talent acquisition is that recruitment marketing has been a local function built around local job boards. Social media and systemized talent acquisition processes are creating a window of opportunity to standardize recruiting activities on a global scale and create effective processes so that the global process can outperform local services in terms of costs and results.

What about the current state of global hiring needs an overhaul in your view?

The recruitment market has been slower in the past two years than we experienced in the previous few years. This temporary situation is caused by companies being cautious about investing during the economic downturn. The underlying challenges causing the “War for Talent” that we had in the market before this downturn have not disappeared, and we will see companies facing similar recruitment challenges to those in 2021 when the market recovers.

A quick shout-out to some innovative HRTech innovators you’ve been watching from around the world before we wrap up?

I have a huge respect for HiBob, a company in the HR tech space. The founder and CEO, Ronni Zehavi, and his team have done an amazing job creating a really user-friendly and holistic core HR tool. We are also very happy customers of HiBob ourselves.

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