Internet Week Slovenia recently announced the launch of a job portal that is specifically dedicated to startups and young IT companies. Free of charge and presented in English, StartupJob.si aims to attract both local and regional talent to fuel Slovenia’s growing startup ecosystem.
Who came up with this initiative and why?
StartupJob.si is the next evolutionary step of activities by Internet Week Slovenia. Last October, we started the Startup Crawl open days to enable both members of the community and the broader public to come closer to interacting with the concept of startup companies by getting familiar with them up close and personal. By this March, Startup Crawl was adopted by young and seasoned talent as a good way to stress test their potential future employers. So in May, we decided to add a section to the Internet Weekly events newsletter, turning it into an “events+jobs” newsletter and that caught on so nicely, we decided to upgrade and bring in extra transparency and some support for tracking basic statistics.
What are the main features of the portal?
We launched it as a simple marketplace – jobs on one side, and a talent bank with resumes on the other. Users can post both types of content but everything goes through editorial review and we’re not making the talent bank publicly accessible yet. A bunch of nifty features are going to be launched in batches over the coming months, but for now we want people to think of it as an extension of what they were otherwise getting with our weekly newsletter.
Internet Week-Team: Natasa Pirnat and Gaja ZornadaHow is the response so far?
The response in the firstweek has exceeded our expectations. We have a little under 1000 active registered users, with a female vs. male gender ratio of about 30:70. Quite a few people submitted resumes to showcase their talent and we also already have some users from neighbouring countries. Companies are confirming that applicants coming through StartupJob.si differ significantly in quality from other sources, which makes us believe we have managed to tap into a relevant talent pool.
Is the (un)employment level in the startup field different than the global situation’s one in Slovenia?
That’s difficult to answer but I think I can put it this way. Export oriented technology companies are growing stronger and hiring more. So you can say we’re on a mission to make them show up on career wish-lists for the best talent out there. A convincing percentage of startups has also reached the point where they are looking for non-founder talent as well as adding a lot of non-technical team members to help polish off the commercial side of the business. We also believe in workforce mobility and aim to bring the startup sector forward as a viable option for talent considering a career shift as well.
Launch of Silicon Gardens Fund a few months ago, SK50 and SK200 measures created by the government, now this job portal… How do you explain such boost in the Slovene startup ecosystem this year? What is it symptomatic of?
The startup community in Slovenia has started to mature. The fund has been ramping up for quite a while and we seem to have crossed the magical 7-year line, which proved to various levels of our government that the startup sector is worth looking at. A reception of some of the more visible members of the startup community by the President of Slovenia in April was symptomatic of this as well. There’s also a visible increase in the strength and size of the survivors in the startup game and globally recognisable names are drawing more and more attention (look at Bitstamp, Celtra, Outfit7, Zemanta, for example). Talent hunt is open for all and regional borders are not a factor anymore.
