GrabJobs Startup Strategy Facing Business Challenges in Pandemic

As a result of the pandemic that occurred since some time ago, many startups from various fields were forced to get a hard blow to their business. Like startups in the field of employee recruitment or job vacancies for example. GrabJobs, which is a Singapore-based startup engaged in the field, acknowledges this.

Emmanuel Crouy as Co-founder and CEO of GrabJobs, revealed that the pandemic situation made the company take decisions that could minimize damage and make the company adapt quickly to new challenges.

“When Singapore began implementing self-distancing in February 2020, we realized that a crisis was ahead of us and we had to make big changes quickly to be able to deal with it,” Emmanuel said.

Grabjobs finally made a big sacrifice drastically by cutting costs by 75%. “The steps start from layoffs, salary cuts, to business operations cuts. As a result of the budget reduction that has been done, we have to be 200% more creative in achieving the acquisition of users and clients,” said Emmanuel.

Cost-Effective Solution for Companies

GrabJobs himself claims to have used a period of low activity during the circuit breaker to experiment with growth hacks.

“Due to current market conditions and the improvements we made to the acquisition model, we have added 50,000 new users organically every month. The highest level of activity comes from Indonesia where job applications have grown 20 times in the last 2 months, while we spent $ 0 on marketing strategies,” Emmanuel explained.

Singapore is currently experiencing an economic recession and recovery is expected to be slow. During times of economic crisis like this, businesses must make savings for their operations. According to GrabJobs Head of Business Development, Valentin Berard, this is the right time to offer cost-saving solutions.

In this regard, GrabJobs has helped companies save costs, time, and resources by reducing the recruitment process by 90%. On the same hand, the company’s expenses are comparable to the premium recruitment solutions that GrabJobs provides.

“In the past month we have seen a record number of clients who subscribe continues to grow, this is higher than during the pre-pandemic situation. Of course, this is a positive sign that the economy in the region is improving despite fears a second wave will soon occur, “said Valentin.

Innovate to Improve Platform Services

Increased job insecurity and corporate cost-cutting measures made by the Covid-19 pandemic seem to have supported platforms such as GrabJobs to continue to innovate to solve problems.

When asked about work platform innovation, Emmanuel answered the next logical step was to add free services related to work to improve one’s livelihood.

“We will soon be pioneering our ecosystem for job seekers which will include online courses, financial services, and lifestyle promotion,” Emmanuel explained. For your information, GrabJobs is a startup that provides a recruitment automation platform that focuses on frontline workers or frontline workers).

Founded in early 2016, GrabJobs is present as a pioneer in a career platform in Southeast Asia that utilizes Interview Chatbots in the process of applying for a job. This allows job seekers to be recruited immediately in a short time, even just a day. Until now, GrabJobs has recorded more than one million users.

Besides, there are already thousands of companies that use the GrabJobs platform to simplify the process of recruiting employees for their stores or branches. Some of the names of the companies are Uniqlo, H&M, Zara, Intercontinental Hotel Group, and others.

He said, there was no overnight success. Because it requires more than four years and many failed attempts to build products that fit many markets.

“We started with a working application interface using simple chat and developed into an end-to-end recruitment platform. As a result, our iteration and tenacity paid off. We have achieved profits for the last three months in a row,” Emmanuel added.