New York City-based startup JIBE first appeared on the scene in late 2009 as LocalBacon, a job board that required job-seekers to pay 99 cents to apply for positions, weeding out less serious candidates. Several months later in March 2010, the company smartly re-positioned itself as JIBE — a recruiting platform to help people find jobs through their social networks.
The pivot was a smart one: A $6 million Series A round followed in mid-2011, and JIBE grew to have a staff of 18 across three offices in the US.
Despite the decent traction, JIBE recently tweaked its mission once again — and this could be its savviest move yet. JIBE has shifted its core technology to be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that plugs into company job boards and makes any job posting capable of receiving applications through mobile devices.
JIBE believes that in the near future many people will be applying to jobs through smartphones and tablets, not traditional desktop or laptop computers. It may seem far-fetched right now — personally, applying for jobs has always been something that’s will required my full keyboard-and-screen attention. But then again, it wasn’t so long ago at all that people thought digital job applications would never seriously take off. Remember paying extra at Kinko’s to print your resume on really nice paper?
So I sat down with JIBE CEO and founder Joe Essenfeld to hear first-hand the details about his company’s shift to a SaaS strategy. Watch the video embedded below to hear him discuss why mobile could own the future of job applications, how JIBE sells its platform to huge Fortune 500 companies as a relatively small startup, what were the signs that have led JIBE to tweak its strategy, and more.
|
New York City-based startup JIBE first appeared on the scene in late 2009 as LocalBacon, a job board that required job-seekers to pay 99 cents to apply for positions, weeding out less serious candidates. Several months later in March 2010, the company smartly re-positioned itself as JIBE — a recruiting platform to help people find jobs through their social networks.
The pivot was a smart one that led to funding and customer wins. But despite the traction, JIBE recently tweaked its mission once again — and this could be its savviest move yet.}
Read more : JIBE Goes SaaS To Make All Job Applications Mobile-Friendly
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.