In the era of social recruiting, more and more startups pay their attention to contribute something on those area. Job Forward is just one of them. Job Forward (http://job-fw.sg/) is a social based recruiting platform to help employers find right talents through social media, and is a one-year-old startup who raised its seed funding from a Venture Capital institute.
According to a Manpower Group survey in 2014, 36% of employers have difficulties finding candidates to fill open positions, with particular issues faced by the startup community such as a limited network to tap into.
Job Forward said it aims to solve this hiring issue by addressing an obstacle that is oftentimes overlooked: The importance that company culture plays into attracting passionate talent. The startup claims that their first priority focus on users. Thus, posting jobs are free. Employers and recruiting firms only paid per hiring.
Job Forward was incorporated in December 2013 and launched alpha product in May 2014. They have launched alpha product in Singapore, but plan to expand across ASEAN regions for which they are doing market assessment testing right now.
Their CEO, Yoshiaki Ieda, tells, “As the Regional Marketing Manager for Procter & Gamble, I was able to gain the global perspective and experience that allowed me to see a market opportunity—most of the job portals existing currently were simply job listing sites.”
Yoshiaki Ieda, CEO of Job Forward
Once he saw this problem, his inherent passion for entrepreneurship drove him to create a clear agenda for bridging this opportunity between social media, and online job recruitment.
“So came forth the idea of Job Forward as a job distribution site that will tap into not only networks of active job seekers, but also passive job seekers—those who might not know of better opportunities because they are not actively looking, but would be interested if they saw a better position available,” he added.
LinkedIn and other online recruitment sites are simply job listing sites. Job Forward’s focus is to distribute job opportunities through social media—to connect job seekers to employers through multiple social media channels, with LinkedIn just being one of the many platforms that Job Forward will use.
Typically, only active job seekers will leverage traditional job listing sites. Given that Job Forward is a platform for job post distribution, and because content and distribution are equally important, by leveraging Startup Essence, startups and SMEs can create the content that will further retain the interest generated by the distributed job posts.
“As a market place business, our first biggest challenge is how to overcome the Chicken & Egg problem. To tackle with the problem, we plan to make alliances with recruiting firms so that we can secure initial number of job posts,” explains Ieda who has 10 years experience in HR, internet, and marketing in global roles.
See: Temploy: Ready to Promote Temporary Hiring as a New Trend
