Roman Prokofiev is an IT Entrepreneur, Co-founder of Jooble, one of the top-ranked employment companies in the world. Roman was born in 1985 in Kherson, Ukraine. Roman launched Jooble in 2006 with his business partner Eugeniy. From the first of the university, Roman started working as a programmer and in his second year of the university, he decided to create his own company. This is how Teamsoft was founded in 2003. The company was all about the development of corporate solutions for pharmaceutical companies. Five years later, Teamsoft became the leader in terms of the number of implemented licenses for pharmaceutical companies in Ukraine.
While working as a head of Teamsoft, he faced problems finding new developers. Job sites gave out the same positions, there were no necessary filters to optimize the search. Then he invited his friend Eugeniy to develop a search for resumes and vacancies. So, in 2006 their joint project named Jooble was launched.
What is Jooble all about?
My name is Roman Prokofiev. I am a co-founder of Jooble. Jooble is an international job search website. In other words, Jooble is like Google but only for jobs. We collect job postings from thousands of different sites to make it easier for candidates to find new opportunities.
Our mission is to help people find the jobs of their dreams. Jooble was established in 2006. Today, Jooble operates in 71 countries in 24 different languages and is used by millions of people. Jooble is among TOP-3 websites in the world in terms of traffic in the Jobs and Career segment, according to SimilarWeb.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
From an early age, I started to demonstrate talent in the exact sciences. I graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Lyceum. As a high school student, I participated in many physics and mathematics Olympiads. On the basis of my love for the exact sciences, I met my friend and future business partner Evgeniy Sobakarev. I and Evgeniy entered the same faculty of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute – computer science and computer engineering. And, of course, we shared a room in the dormitory. We both already knew how to code well enough, and the first year at the institute was such a disappointment for us! Because we realized that there was nothing new to learn there.
Prior to this project, I had a software development company and one of the positions I was looking for on my staff was an implementation consultant with knowledge of the pharmaceutical market.
This was a very rare position, so I had to spend a lot of time on job sites looking for suitable resumes. It was 2006. The sites were very inconvenient, poor search, a lot of duplicate resumes on different sites. To find 2-3 candidates for an interview, it took me to spend 4-5 hours.
At the same time, a friend approached me with ideas to launch a news aggregation service, to which I replied that I do not understand the news market, but I had a “pain” in recruiting. And so Jooble was born – a search engine for vacancies and resumes. Over time, we abandoned the search for resumes and focused only on finding vacancies.
In 2006, we did not monitor the western market and made the service the way we saw fit. This is precisely the reason that in the next 2 years after the launch, we demonstrated rather modest results. Together with a partner, we came from B2B and invested our own money in the project. In fact, we spent 2 years understanding how the Internet works. In 2008, we realized that the model was working in Ukraine and began an active expansion. Today Jooble operates in 71 countries. The daily audience is about 4 million users.
For half a year we were unprofitable, for the next year and a half we were at zero operating level, and in 2008 we started making our first profit and invested in Jooble’s expansion to other markets.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- Flexibility – the ability to quickly adapt during periods of growth, to meet new consumer requirements
- Focus – to have a clear goal not in terms of making money (although without this the company could not exist), but also in terms of changing people’s lives for the better
- Strategic thinking – no one has the ability to foresee but taking into account multiple scenarios and thinking broadly is very important for growth.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
Currently, we operate in 71 countries, in 24 different languages. We are planning to expand our company, operating in more countries and in more languages thus helping everyone find jobs of their dreams. We try to be better than the previous years. We compare our statistics with previous years. Every year we recruit more employees than in the previous years. If we can’t develop our business for more than 70%, then it is a failure for me.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
As with every business, the pandemic adversely affected our business. Our traffic spontaneously decreased. We lost nearly 40% of our audience as everyone were in lockdown and was not much demand for work. However, we did not fire our employees. We moved to remote work, we had virtual meetings, but we didn’t stop our work. Fortunately, we survived this pandemic and soon we recuperated.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
The moment of growth came when we realized that the biggest source of audience on the Internet is Google. What you need to be able to rank in the search engines. When a user wants to find a job, the first place he goes is Google. And if you are not on Google, you do not exist.
We began to look for ways to get into Google and gain a foothold there. When our experiments were crowned with success, Jooble began to grow rapidly – every year the amount of traffic to the site increased 4 times.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
- Email Marketing – effective email marketing, and follow up is so important to bring your audience back to the site
- SEO – search engine optimization is important to optimize for Google passage ranking and understand the users better.
- Marketing Analytics – it is also important to understand the attractiveness and dynamics of a market. Through this analysis, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the company can be identified.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
It is a good question. What helps me stay driven and motivated to keep going in my business is my family, my team, my yearly goals to expand the business. If we can’t expand our business compared to the last year, it is a failure for us. Therefore, it is important to make employees happy, to recruit more employees to keep expanding.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
I would say act in spite of fear. Everyone has a fear, but if you believe in something so much, all your fears disappear.
Focus on your consumers. I would advise everyone who wants to launch his own business to be ready for a long period of problems and obstacles, but if an entrepreneur untiringly cares about the excellence of his products or services and desires to be the best in the market, then success is inevitable.
It is important to concentrate on short-term goals, otherwise, everything will collapse. If you are an entrepreneur, you will need to deal with the most difficult problems.
Strive for excellence. Every production has flows. If you do your best to achieve excellence, success will wait for you.
What is your definition of success?
For me, success is persistence, the ability to take risks, belief in the product.
In my opinion, persistence is the ability to not stop towards failure, to keep the belief in your goals. In other words, it is one of the most important qualities in humans which helps to confront failure. Persistence gives an opportunity to solve many problems and achieve your goals.
Every business is a risk. Nobody can achieve success without taking risks. In entrepreneurial activity, the risk is the threat of loss of resources invested in the production process, the shortfall in the planned income. It can arise at any stage of production, as well as in any area of business: the risk of losing a supplier of materials, the risk of choosing the wrong marketing strategy, the risk of hiring an incompetent person for a key position, etc.
Believing in the product is like believing in yourself. You should believe in the product that it will be useful for people. If you think only making money your business won’t sustain long. Believe in your company, believe in your product, believe in yourself, then you march to success.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I try to tell myself that even if I fail, I am doing something useful for people. I try to tell myself that I help people find jobs and help other companies find the right employees. I try to tell myself I am not trying to be perfect; I am just trying to be better than yesterday thus I can achieve excellence and overcome my fear.
What is your favorite quote?
Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success
– Napoleon Hill
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