Growth Story: What CornerJob did to become Spain’s fastest growing tech startup

Growth Story is a new 4-question format we’re doing about the moment startups found a defining metric that they could influence to really grow their company.

To kick this new series off, we had an inspiring chat with David Rodriguez, CEO and co-founder of CornerJob, a startup that runs a two-sided app for employment. CornerJob just landed the title of Spain’s fastest growing start-up in our Tech5 competition. But how did they manage to get there? What metric did they find to achieve their spectacular growth? In short: Influencing the amount of recurrent employers posting listings, by closely monitoring the liquidity of job posts and candidates in sectors and geographies. This is Cornerjob’s story, use it to your advantage.

The company

“What we’re doing at CornerJob is streamlining and accelerating recruitment for non-executive jobs or lightly qualified jobs, high rotation jobs, and we’re doing that thanks to a 100% mobile experience for candidates, and on the company side we’ve been on mobile and desktop from day one.

We have four pillars, which are simplicity, interaction, geolocation, and speed. What that means, is that candidates can register in less than a minute, apply in one tap, and then if companies preselect them or shortlist them, they can interact through a messaging system on the platform.

We’re making the experience simple  to publish their profile instantly with just a picture, and a tweet format, 140 characters for the job description and geolocation from their mobile. Thanks to this, employers can publish as easily as they would put a poster on the front of their shop. We’re bringing a lot of offers on the app which used to be more in the grey offline market before.

One specificity is that we provide an answer to candidates within 24 hours. The application has a shorter lifecycle, companies just screen candidates with a standardized profile and preselect them or reject them. They’re the ones in control of the communication channel.

With CornerJobs, we’ve gone for a performance model. We have a format that starts four steps later than a standard job board. A standard job board like Monster would charge for an ad, €200 for 30 days, and you’re publishing it, and there’s no promise on the results.

Later, people like Indeed started with a pay-per-click transactional model, a transcription of what Google was doing with Google Adwords, but for job boards. We didn’t stop there, we were saying, companies, you can publish for free, you can get visibility for free and clicks on your ads for free and work on your employer branding this way. We could have charged for candidates – if you post an offer and get 100 candidates, we charge you by candidate. We decided not to do that. We had to take it a step further and charge companies only when they’ve seen a candidate and want to interact with him or her. So, that’s what we call shortlistings.

We’re packaging that on a SaaS model, which is made of different plans that depend on your volume of recruitment.

We’re now active in four countries: Italy, France, Spain and Mexico. In all countries where we are active, we’ve been number one in the rankings of the app stores in terms of downloads in the recruitment space.”

The metric

“From the beginning, we identified one metric as our core focus. We communicate and monitor this metric constantly.

It’s percentage growth in listings from recurring listers. So, not the number of listings, which obviously are also important, but what we look at is the percentage of listings that have been posted by recurring listers, i.e. existing clients. This number gives us a sense of engagement of our clients, of companies that are our paying customers.

As you can see in the graph below, we’ve been constantly growing that metric to reach levels which are almost at 70% now. Obviously, we won’t reach 100%, because that would mean that we’re not acquiring any new clients, but at the moment we’re maintaining this percantage with an average growth of 20% additional new listers every month.

This to us is terrific.”

The moment

“We realized that when you work in a marketplace based on liquidity, you always need to have a balance in the two-sided marketplace. Since our geographical footprint is at the national level, in all the countries that we are active in, and considering that we operate multi-sector, we have to monitor this balance. We can’t just look at overall volumes of the sector of the marketplace, we also have to monitor very closely our liquidity on two axes, which are sectors and geographies.

Our Business Intelligence team monitors the levels of liquidity with indicators telling us that maybe in Lyon we have too many candidates who want to be servers in restaurants and we don’t have enough restaurant offers this month or this day. If we don’t have enough offers of this type, then the clear indication is to go acquire companies in this geography within this type of sector during these couple of days.

If it’s on the candidate side – when we don’t have enough candidates for the amount of offers that we have open – then it’s more a marketing team activity. We’ll be doing acquisition much more focused on this segment of candidates, mainly through online and social media campaigns.

This balancing of liquidity is what ultimately provides the engagement of companies on the company side. They’re much more satisfied if they can find the right candidate at the right time for the right sector, of course.”

The solution

“What we decided from the start was to go after the big companies as our clients. Why? Because big companies help us scale at a national level very quickly and offer enough recurring listings.

When one tries to acquire small independent restaurants, the repetition in listings is not going to be high. The restaurant management will recruit one new server now, and maybe one more in a couple of months, whereas when you go to a large restaurant chain, like we did, you’re reaching a deal that goes national very quickly and where there’s a lot of repetition and a lot of volume.

In doing that, we were simultaneously working on the brand, which is extremely important. We needed to generate a strong brand and really be top of mind in our sector in all of our markets. This now translates into a lot of organic growth in terms of listers and candidates.

We sent our sales teams to acquire the big companies on a national level first and simultaneously worked on the brand, and most of the smaller companies came automatically.

That’s what we’re seeing in our figures today.”

In the lead-up to Tech5 2017 – the annual competition organized by TNW and Adyen which celebrates Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies in The Netherlands, UK, Germany, Spain, France and Sweden– we’re launching a series of remarkable stories of businesses that experienced extreme growth. But if you are a startup with an inspiring/remarkable/interesting story about finding your special metric that led to growth, please share it with sebastiaan@thenextweb.com.