Job search is also a job. Often, it takes time before the applicant and the employer find each other. CornerJob startup has come up with a way to speed up this process. David Rodriguez, CEO of CornerJob, and several of his associates launched a website that allows anyone to find a job or an employee. You can be sure there will be a guaranteed answer, the average response time is 48 hours. You simply create your account and communicate directly with those who are interested in you.

That’s what the CEO of CornerJob told us about the principles of the service and the development of the startup itself.

What is CornerJob?

CornerJob is a job matching platform for lightly skilled jobs that helps people find the right job and companies find the right candidates, in the shortest time frame.

Our users experience a whole new hassle-free job search. We’re accelerating and streamlining the recruitment process thanks to a mobile experience for candidates, and both mobile and desktop experience for companies.

When and how did you get the idea to create such a project? Why did you choose this trend for a startup?

The idea came 3,5 years ago with my co-founders. We figured out that surprisingly, at a time when smartphone was eventually available in the pockets of the major part of the population, there was no solution tailored for the specific needs of the blue collar recruitment and taking advantage of a mobile experience.

The on-demand economy had reached many sectors like transportation, food delivery etc, but nothing was there for recruitment.

So with the combined entrepreneurial experience of my co-founders and myself we decided to take the challenge ahead, and seize this major opportunity to reinvent the recruitment experience in the blue collar space.

Do you have any worthy competitors, and how do you deal with them?

We have a unique value proposition and have by far grown at unprecedented levels with more than 11 million app users and 300.000 companies recruiting through CornerJob. Some of our customers (companies) used traditional job boards in the past, and others were relying on word of mouth because traditional job boards were too complex and not adapted to their needs.

What are your competitive advantages?

CornerJob is simple, fast, interactive, geolocation-based.

Job seekers create a profile in less than a minute, apply in one tap and quickly access thousands of job offers. All in one place: their mobile. Recruiters are enabled to recruit anytime, anywhere, on the device they prefer. We use AI to ensure each user and company get a personalised and relevant feed and matching without having to input much data.

Is this the first your startup or did you have another ones previously? What are these projects and on what stages they are?

I was General Manager at another startup (Hailo) before launching CornerJob, and prior to this, I also launched another startup in the etravel space. But I have been fully dedicated to Cornerjob since we launched.

If you do not mind my asking, what was the investment amount for project creation and initial promotion? Was it an investor’s money or your personal savings? If it was an investor’s help, could you tell us how you found him.

We had the first seed round with personal savings of the four co-founders (six digit number), and a few weeks later, we closed a first round with a set of business angels close to the ANTAI fund (seven digit number). These invested in CornerJob because of two reasons: they trusted the team of founders which already had a good track record, and we could show great metrics and traction from the very beginning.

What experts were indispensable at the stage of creating and launching a project?

We concentrated on execution and could get the help of ANTAI to support us on finance, legal, recruitment and even an in-house CTO until we recruited ours.

What were the challenges during the launch and how did you cope with them?

The main difficulty was to keep a balance on the marketplace (between job offers and candidates) as we were scaling  and doing this in a record time. We launched TV campaigns at national level within just a few months and the pressure was permanent to reach a good volume of job offers and candidates then.

What markets are you entering and what ones are in your plans? Why?

We are already present in France, Italy, Spain and Mexico. We are not disclosing our expansion roadmap, but we are aiming at becoming a global player.

How do you promote CornerJob?

We promote CornerJob by combining both offline and online marketing initiatives.

We primarily focus on performance activities to improve our customer acquisition and retention. Last but not least, our PR activities help us increase our brand awareness and thought leadership across our markets.

What is the most effective approach for your product promotion?

Once the wheel is spinning, having a great product really makes the difference.

But back to our different promotion channels, we don’t believe in only looking at performance on a channel per channel approach. This would easily lead us to think that online is the best performing channel, but the reality is that each channel helps the other one and has a different function. TV, press, radio or outdoor increase the effectiveness of online campaigns, as well as increasing brand awareness and credibility.

How to start promoting a young technology project in your opinion?

We went for big marketing campaigns from start because we had a mainstream target audience. But depending on your service and target audience, you might want to do much narrower targeting, and spend more time finding the right product market fit.

What of your knowledge and skills were useful while launching the project?

Our previous experience of building companies and disrupting traditional businesses with a mobile and digital experience was very helpful.

Would you recommend to startuppers to subscribe for the pages of any Internet communities able to provide them with some helpful information? Which ones?

Startup Grind is perfect to ask questions, share ideas and find connections. I would also recommend joining Product Hunt, which allows startuppers to get extremely valuable marketing and product feedback for their startups.

If there were no CornerJob, what another project would you develop?

I’d probably start a venture builder to be involved in various projects and share my experience with CEOs.

How do you see further development of your project?

We will become the reference platform for the professional life of blue collar workers.

But closer to now, stay tuned. We’ll have great news to announce soon.

What is the most valuable business advice you’ve ever received?

Speed is the ultimate competitive advantage.