The Inspiration

Back in 2010, a friend of mine just started out his career as an engineer for a local tech company. As a fresh grad, things were going pretty well – the pay was good with plenty of performance opportunities. He took up a part-time master course for career development because he considered himself financially stable.

But that stability turned into crumbs the moment the company announced they were downsizing due to financial difficulties. According to the Last In First Out policy, my friend, John, who was only 18 months into the job, was among the unfortunate employees to be let go.

With little savings and only 1-month compensation, John needed to get a new job as soon as possible to finance his daily expenses and part-time education. He tried applying through online job boards. But after sending out resume after resume, frustration replaces hope as no interviews came his way. Soon days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and John was left with no choice but to ask his parents for financial aid. In the end, he did get a job, but it was already 6 months later with a 10% pay cut.

John’s story is a universal story shared by many. It is almost impossible to foresee the loss of jobs due to failing businesses or economic downturns. But when it happens, the need to secure a new job fast without compromising the pay and quality of the job becomes a real predicament. Experiencing this predicament first hand, John, now my business partner, has inspired me to make a difference for people in need of the right jobs, and fast.

And this story became the spark that ignites our passion for starting up JobRewards.

The Beginning

I have known John since our Intel days. We used to brainstorm business ideas with a few friends and deep down I know like me, he has the ambition, guts and entrepreneur heart within him. However, our time working together is short-lived as we went separate ways. While John moved to Sarawak to pursue a path in management, I went for an AI (Artificial Intelligence) engineering role.

Then in mid-2019, I bumped into John during my lunch break. When he told me he was back to Penang for good, I asked him out for coffee to catch up. We talked about our career so far and the good old days when we used to brainstorm business ideas. That was when John shared his story about how difficult it was to get a job fast without compromising on the pay, and then an idea was seeded in our minds - what if, we can change the game in the current job recruitment landscape? That finding new jobs can not only be fast and easy but also rewarding? The fire to make a difference is ignited, and we know it was the right time to start up something together.

At the time, both of us still have a full-time job so we can only meet after work. As our late-night rendezvous for brainstorming continued for months, we came out with a concrete plan to make our idea work.

We need to identify our position in the current job recruitment market and decide which direction of growth we want to pursue. We started talking to close friends and family members for ideas and did extensive research on job industries in Malaysia and the current hiring trends in Southeast Asia (SEA).

We found out that the job recruitment industry is evergreen and fast-growing, and also there is a rising demand for professionals in SEA, so there is a big market to capture. Therefore, to outcompete the rest, we are going to position ourselves as a cost-effective and quality-assured job recruitment agency and one-stop solution for both employers and job-seekers. 

The Job Problem

Traditional job posting often attracts irrelevant candidates. Despite paying a premium, many companies often waste a lot of time and manpower filtering through every candidate who responds to the job post before they can even interview relevant ones. Given anyone, even without the right qualifications and criteria, can just click “apply”, there is no way to guarantee the quality of candidates.

By relying on job posting itself is also too passive, especially for companies needing new staff urgently. In the end, many companies still have to turn to recruitment agencies or head hunters who will often charge a hefty commission for their services. Although, highly-talented candidates who have been head-hunted may not be interested in making a move because the salary is just not attractive enough. There is just not enough motivation to switch jobs.

From the perspective of job seekers, many candidates are unable to find the right job through the job posting. With so many “competitors”, by the time the company has filtered through the mountains of applicants to arrange for an interview, that may be months later and the candidate may have already taken another job for better or worse. Even if not, so much time has been wasted unnecessarily before the candidate can even get an interview for the job. This limits the potential of talented jobseekers landing the right job. 

In short, there is still a gap in the current system to efficiently (fast & easily) bridge the right talents to the right employers and vice versa.

The Rewards Solution

Since we set up JobRewards in January 2020, we have devised simple solutions to address the gap:

From the employer’s perspective, we aim to lower the hiring cost while shortening the time of delivering qualified candidates. Our services are value for money as our rate is affordable and services professional. Our core team is made up of a bunch of passionate, energetic and tech-savvy talents who are pros in working smart and fast to boost hiring efficiency.

The more recruiters we have, the faster we can deliver qualified candidates to our partners. As such, we came up with the solution of tapping into the sharing economy - by adopting an Open For All (OFA) recruiting model. Through this model, we allow part-time recruiters to access our platform and pay them on a case-by-case basis. But to maintain the quality of our services, our in-house core team will be the ones to deal with our partners and listen closely to their needs. 

From the perspective of job seekers, our professional team will only recommend the right jobs to our candidates, as we also strive to bridge qualified candidates with quality companies. To build a stable user base and to reward our candidates for getting a new job or making a move to develop their career paths, we are giving out a chunk of our service fees as a 5% annual salary bonus reward to our users who secured a job through us. 

As a complementary approach to shorten candidate delivery time, not only are we providing professional job recruitment services, we also allow companies who still want to do job posting to post on our website to advertise vacancies for free.

The Future Expansion

Although job recruitment is an 'old' industry, we aspire to be the pioneer and leader in disrupting the old ways of doing recruitment - because finding the right job should be easy and equally rewarding.

We are launching our crowdfunding campaign to help raise funds to realize that vision. Funds raised will be used for the following:

1. Fleet: Expanding our current core team and OFA recruiters.

2. AI: Expanding our R&D team to focus on fine-tuning and integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) as part of our job matching program to boost hiring efficiency. We believe AI is the future for mundane tasks and data is the greatest asset now.

3. Blockchain: With our expanding user and client base, we plan to integrate blockchain technology to ensure our client and user data are kept securely.

4. Digital Marketing: As the average person now spends a lot of time connected to the internet, digital marketing has become the most cost-effective way of marketing our services. We are riding on this trend to reach out to a wider audience.

Therefore, we are shouting out to like-minded investors to join in our quest to revolutionize the job recruitment cycle and culture.

The time is now for Right Jobs, Real Rewards.

Team 

Term Sheet

Founder Pitch Deck