Startup of the Day: JobCannon, a Ukrainian-founded HRtech startup
JobCannon was founded in 2022 by Peter Kolomiets and Andrii Cherednichenko. Since its launch, it has quickly grown from a small team to a company of 35 specialists who are revolutionizing recruitment as a technology and changing the way we look at the ideology of the process itself. In January 2024, JobCannon raised $500,000 in a new pre-seed funding round.
In the Startup of the Day column, Andrii Cherednichenko, the co-founder of JobCannon, shares the details about the startup’s idea, its product, and future plans.
The Startup of the Day column on AIN.Capital is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originated from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.
Tell us about your startup. How does it work?
Regular recruiting services rely on text resumes that aren’t independently verified. Employers spend 2-3 interviews just to confirm a candidate’s basic skills and relevance. We’re flipping the script by putting assessments at the heart of our process, cutting hiring time in half and saving candidates time on the job hunt, while helping employers to get the most suitable candidate from the first interaction.
How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?
So, at JobCannon, our founding team is a blend of three key elements that we believe are the linchpin for any startup’s success. Peter Kolomiets, our co-founder and CEO, brings a wealth of experience in successful investments. On my end, as a co-founder and Marketing Director, I leverage personal experience in building startups and user acquisition. And finally, we have Alex Molodyk, our COO, who brings his operational and management prowess into the mix.
Drawing on our varied experiences spanning the past two decades in different fields, we’ve developed a streamlined process for launching a startup, whether it’s an IT product or the recruitment business around it, right from the beginning,
What unites us is our commitment to solving the challenges related to hiring employees. It’s a lengthy process, and we’ve encountered situations where someone didn’t quite fit the team. These stories of mismatched hires motivated us at JobCannon.
How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?
We started by testing the assessment in a recruitment agency, then did consumer research to understand our audience and shape the product. After that, we built our MVP. Currently, we are in the testing phase of platform and assessment improvement.
Our testing approach comes from our experience in the recruitment business, forming the core of our IT platform. Now, we’re excited to introduce our MVP platform, jobcannon.io, which focuses on finding the best user paths, tracking conversions, and planning the platform’s future.
When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?
The IT platform launched in mid-January, and currently, we are enhancing the core candidate and company workflows while improving an assessment process. Next on the agenda are the introduction of new features and deeper integration of AI during the whole flow.
Tell us about the startup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?
When it comes to monetization, we’re looking at two main avenues:
- The “hiring fee”. This spproach aligns with the typical model you’d find in recruitment platforms and agencies. Right now, we’re in the process of building the workflow and legal aspects to ensure that both candidates and employers stay within our ecosystem after the hire. Usually, a hiring fee ranges around 7-9% of the candidate’s annual salary.
- The SaaS model. Here, the focus is on payment for a “verified” candidate. Plus, we offer additional features for an enhanced search experience, essentially a standard set for recruitment resources. As we go through the testing phase, we’ll be closely examining what works best for the overall stability of the company’s ecosystem and tweaking these models accordingly.
What are your target markets and consumers?
The primary target audience for our MVP consists of software developers specializing in major programming languages. We’ve adopted this approach because there’s consistently high demand for them, and we’re well-versed in the testing methodologies relevant to their field.
We’re initially focusing on Europe, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Israel. Why these regions? Well, we have a well-established recruitment process in place for these countries and an understanding of the market from “inside”.
The key challenges we address for candidates include a single test for over 100 relevant vacancies, fair assessment, and convenient job search. For companies, it means access to pre-tested, relevant, and motivated candidates. Combining all these elements results in a faster job search and vacancy closure for both parties by streamlining the initial recruitment steps (sourcing, reaching out, and the initial assessment of candidates).
If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.
Our primary metrics revolve around hiring and the speed of the hiring process. Since we’ve recently launched, we’re not in a position to draw conclusive metrics just yet. However, we are monitoring our performance indicators, continually enhancing them, and plan to share insights in the future.
What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.
The team is divided into product and business directions. The product side includes departments of platform developers, product managers, and marketers. The primary goal of the product team is to thoroughly understand the pain points of our audience and create the perfect user journey from advertisement to completing testing on the platform.
On the business side, we have the sales team and recruiters. Their task is to attract B2B clients to the platform and work with candidates on the platform, helping them find jobs.
Currently, we have over 30 team members. Securing investments will help us scale even more and operate more efficiently.
Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment
It started as a self-funding project, and then we secured a pre-seed round. JobCannon attracted $500,000 in investment from Whitehill Capital with the support of the World Bank. Currently, we are in negotiations with several private investors and venture funds interested in financing the project for the seed round.
What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.
Looking ahead, our R&D efforts will mainly focus on improving soft skills testing, adding assessments for hard skills, and involving Ph.D.-level experts to enhance our testing methods.
Our Big Idea is to become the “quality mark” for those seeking jobs by implementing affordable yet profound candidate assessments,
In the future, we aim to provide recommendations on how individuals can improve their skills to boost their careers, earn bigger salaries, and how to explore their characters to truly engage in what they find interesting and lucrative in life as general.
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