Berlin-based Rocket Internet is broadening its already wide portfolio of companies with Everjobs, a career-listings platform. Like other Rocket Internet companies, Everjobs, which is already live in Sri Lanka, will tackle emerging markets in Asia and Africa and plans to expand rapidly.
Everjobs co-founder Ronald Schuurs says Rocket Internet decided to take on job listings after the success of its site Work.com.mm, which began operating in Myanmar last year. Despite launching with little fanfare and minimal marketing, Work.com.mm now claims about 1 million page views per month, with about 140,000 unique visitors. Rocket Internet says this makes it the top jobs site in Myanmar.
Like other Rocket Internet companies, including real-estate listings site Lamudi and car classifieds platform Carmudi, Everjobs will first enter what Schuurs calls “frontier markets,” or countries where Internet penetration is still very low.
By going in as a first mover in those areas, Rocket Internet hopes to cement market leadership as more people get online. Everjobs will launch an Android app later this month to target users who access the Internet mainly through their smartphones.
Everjobs currently has 1,000 job listings in Sri Lanka. Schuurs says the site decided to launch there first because the company believes Sri Lanka is overlooked by other tech companies. Everjobs already faces competition there, however, in the form of established job portals like topjobs, CV, and Sri Lanka Job Bank.
Schuurs says Everjobs will differentiate by offering a “more modern” approach. By that, he means that Everjobs will go beyond just posting help-wanted ads and take a strategy similar to Glassdoor in the U.S. by providing job seekers with additional information about company culture, as well as articles and other content about career issues to draw users back even after they find employment.
The site also has tools like a CV builder and direct messaging, which Schuurs says is important because many people in emerging markets prefer to use SMS alternatives like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger instead of email.
Furthermore, as Everjobs builds a network through Southeast Asian countries and Africa, applicants seeking jobs in different countries may be able to benefit by using it as a one-stop shop for listings, instead of having to search across different sites. This is potentially a key selling point in Southeast Asia, where many workers across the region migrate to jobs in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.
With the launch of its Sri Lanka site, Everjobs joins 17 other companies in Rocket Internet’s Asia Pacific Internet Group (APACIG) and Africa Internet Group (AIG). Schuurs says Everjobs will follow a similar expansion plan to Carmudi and Lamudi.
“Within these countries and on a more regional scale, you can say we know quite a bit about how to do business in some of these frontier markets, which is totally different than doing business in the U.S. or Europe, so knowledge sharing is one of the most important things,” says Schuurs.
“If you look at the tech side of things, depending on the country you don’t want to have a very complicated website that takes up a lot of broadband. We can do this well, because we’ve been doing it for a while.”
A schedule of country launches has yet to be finalized, but Schuurs says Everjobs’ first African country will probably be Cameroon.