Jobspotting

Jobspotting was a data-driven recruitment platform founded in Berlin, Germany, in 2013 by a team with significant experience in search technology and digital media. The founders included Hessam Lavi, Jan Backes, and Manuel Holtz, all former Google employees who leveraged their expertise in search quality and data analysis. Hessam Lavi, prior to Jobspotting, had founded BerlinStartupJobs.com and worked on Google's Search Quality team. Jan Backes also had a seven-year tenure at Google, focusing on search and data quality. Robin Haak, a co-founder of the Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator, joined the founding team in 2014, bringing his network and media industry experience to guide fundraising, marketing, and sales.

The company's core offering was a personalized job recommendation engine that aimed to solve the inefficiencies of online job searching. By utilizing semantic analysis and machine learning algorithms, the platform could understand the nuances of job advertisements and match them to candidates based on their skills, experience, and personal preferences. The engine aggregated listings from numerous job boards, providing job seekers with a single point of access to a wide range of opportunities, particularly in the IT and marketing sectors. For employers and recruiters, Jobspotting offered a dashboard with analytics, providing anonymized insights into candidate demographics, skills, and interests, and allowing them to track the performance of their job postings.

Jobspotting operated on a freemium model and was active in ten countries. After receiving initial seed capital from the Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator, the company secured further funding from investors including Horizons Ventures. The platform's distinct value proposition was its ability to provide a more relevant and user-friendly experience compared to traditional job boards, which often presented users with irrelevant listings. This focus on data-driven matching culminated in a significant milestone on January 31, 2017, when Jobspotting was acquired by SmartRecruiters, a San Francisco-based provider of talent acquisition solutions. The acquisition was driven by SmartRecruiters' interest in integrating Jobspotting's advanced matching technology into its own suite of recruiting tools to create a more powerful, data-centric hiring platform. The Jobspotting team continued to operate from Berlin, focusing on developing data-driven products within the SmartRecruiters ecosystem.

Keywords: job recommendation engine, semantic analysis, machine learning recruitment, talent acquisition, Skills Graph, data-driven hiring, personalized job discovery, recruitment analytics, job matching algorithm, Berlin startup, Axel Springer Plug and Play, Hessam Lavi, Jan Backes, Manuel Holtz, Robin Haak, SmartRecruiters acquisition, recruitment marketing, hiring success, candidate matching, job aggregator