There has been a profound shift in the use of technology for the hiring process of professionals. Yet, the experience of matching non-academic talent with jobs satisfies none of the participants. On one side, the candidates can’t find the right role, at the right time, in the right location and at the right reward level. On the other side, recruiters and hiring managers in traditional businesses - like transportation, energy, telecommunications and healthcare - struggle to hire workers at scale.

We see this as a $230B staffing market where the spend gets lost in the maze between (1) the best candidates unable to find the best roles and (2) the employers unable to find the best candidates. This is madness!

An added factor is macro and generational oriented. Many major economies face not only an absolute labor shortage but also a massive shortage of skill. Often, the right skills are in the wrong place or left undiscovered.

This is a profound problem as companies with 1,000+ open requirements are burning money on “post and pray” (ads on jobs sites connected to a legacy ATS). Modern technologies are needed to drive the right volume of applicants and handle those in a sophisticated and respectful way at a demonstrably cheaper price per hire.

Why is HeyJobs so compelling for and where do they fit in?

Firstly, I have a key focus on B2B2C business models. Especially, where the B2C is building a data moat around the consumer experience delivered by the B2B platform. You can see this in my investments into Adfenix, Triptease and Unbabel. HeyJobs builds on this strategy. We build a highly proprietary data asset around the experience consumers have with companies, certain personas, the transactions, the things and the services they engage with.

In our context in recruitment, the consumer is an unskilled worker looking for the right role, at the right time and on the right terms. Job seekers have to apply on multiple job boards, spending hours adding their details and all this does is post their data into an outdated ATS system by a leading - but legacy - technology company for little reward.

Enter HeyJobs. In a reference call, one of the customers told us that their trains would not run in time if HeyJobs technology had not transformed their ability to attract and hire talent. HeyJobs, at that time, were covering less than 5% of their open requirements! Their machine learning algorithms identifies candidates that match a job profile and wins them through an optimised user experience. The result: Predictable Hiring™ at scale with a significantly reduced cost per hire and a massive upside for an increased share of wallet.

So what makes HeyJobs unique in our view?

1. Candidate acquisition at scale through HeyJobs as they deliver a critical service to candidates, recruiters and the hiring managers
2. Predictable Hiring - predictable volume, price, quality & time to hire.
3. Fully automated recruitment marketing at a lower cost. For recruiters, this frees you up for more valuable tasks. For a candidate, HeyJobs makes for a more fun experience.
4. Incredible unit economics clearly showing that HeyJobs found a new way to solve the universal and critical issue of hiring.
5. High NPS from recruiters, which supports significant upsell.

No investment would make sense without both our synopsis of the HeyJobs founders and their synopsis of Notion as an investor.

HeyJobs has two co-founders - Marius Luther and Marius Jeuck. Marius Luther (CEO) and me developed a chemistry very quickly. I was particularly impressed by the combination of his intellectual capacity and scale of thinking. He is executing fast whilst having a very strategic mindset, whereby he synthesises complexity at an incredible speed. Marius Jeuck augments Marius Luther perfectly on the Product and Engineering side with that scarce skill of total comfort in both B2B and B2C. Both have prior experience in competitive environments and are repeat founders meaning they are comfortably steering the company in what can only be described as a hyper growth phase. They were recently recognized as the best tech company to work for in Berlin indicating that the team is scaling extremely well too.

The founders know they can build a massive business with enduring qualities in the coming years. The €230B aggregate spend per year is a burning inefficiency for their prospects. If you read my posts, then you’ll know that my thesis on a deal is always market focused and centres on pain and existential threats to market participants. The job post black hole, consuming €230B in annual spend, has to get solved - it's just a question of by whom. My bet is on Marius and Marius and the team at HeyJobs!

This was a very competitive deal to win. I believe Marius and Marius chose us because they knew that, together, the odds of building a massive company would be enhanced dramatically. I'm finding out that it often best to agree with them!

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Why Notion? A note from the Founders

We realised that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a revolutionary company if we can find the right way to align entrepreneurial and strategic thinking on a world-class level. This way of thinking resonates with Notion’s mindset. They not only invest in SaaS businesses, but they are building and supporting them as they scale massively.

We looked for a VC who understood HeyJobs deeply, rather than try to make us fit into a particular box or category. Then we found a VC who was ready to discuss how we could work together to make HeyJobs a €10bn rather than a €1bn business.

We found Notion to be flexible and founder-friendly on terms, always looking to optimise the common upside of the deal, rather than focusing on the downsides and pushing for one-sided control. During our meetings with Notion and Chris, we received deeply critical questions on how to improve and scale. This value-add was shown throughout the investment process and enhanced by introductions to potential hires and participation in workshops organised by Notion. In a nutshell, we were already exchanging ideas on how to build a massive business.

Further information from TechCrunch can be found here and from HeyJobs here.

Here is the HeyJobs portfolio page.