Interview of Coral Jaén, Info Empleo Marketing Manager

We recently interviewed Coral Jaén, Marketing & Communication Manager at Infoempleo, one of the leading job sites in Spain and one of our 887 job board partners. She talked about Infoempleo, its innovations, its future…and much more. She also gave us her insight of the Spanish e-recruitment market and its future.

Can you provide a brief history of Infoempleo and its main milestones?

Infoempleo is one of the leading Spanish job boards. It is owned by Vocento Media Group, one of the most successful media groups in our country. Infoempleo´s main goal is to help companies recruiting and finding the best talents in its database of 5.5 million jobseekers. Infoempleo also runs Avanza en tu carrera, an education online website with different kinds of training and a complete section of career advice.

Founded in 1982, Infoempleo started its activity as Círculo de Progreso, a selection, recruitment and consulting services company. In 1995, it launched its first Application Tracking System (ATS): Preselec, an offline desktop application with a global CV database to search resumes and locate talents. Later, it created E-preselec, the online global ATS for HR needs.

This job board made a step forward with the Internet’s irruption in order to create an alternative to traditional job search, that’s why in 1998 was born www.infoempleo.com the first Spanish job site. Later it took part of an international partnership of world’s leading job boards covering more than 130 countries, called The Network, in order to provide recruiters with the perfect solution for all their international hiring needs.

As Infoempleo´s mobile traffic increased in the last few years, in 2014 was developed a web app in order to give users a new experience using their smartphones and in December 2015 it has its own responsive website for all kind of dispositives.

Infoempleo also works in a large range of editorial publications. In the education field it has a guide to choose the perfect primary school, and app with qualifications for University entry and a college students’ book and interactive app with advice and a selection of the best universities. It works too to better understand how works the job market publishing a global annual overview of Spanish job market, social networks and labor market study and a review of Internet most interesting careers as SEO, UX, Social Media or Big Data among others.

In November 2015, the whole team made a great work to improve and developed a new website and new company logo with one main objective: to be the best recruitment option for our customers and jobseekers.

How would you describe your company culture and core values?

Infoempleo is a team that enjoys its work. We are different, agile, versatile and innovative. It is a perfect mix of youth and experience; an unconventional company full of talents.

Our mission is to be the referent in talent and recruitment, offering an exquisite attention and service to our clients and candidates and keeping our commitment with the society. We are working to be the leading group in sharing job offers in Spain and our goal is to grow our database of talents.

According to SimilarWeb, Infoempleo is the Spanish #3 for jobs and employment right after #1 Infojobs and #2 Indeed. What can you tell us about the positioning of Infoempleo in the Spanish market?

We are working very hard to keep our second leading position on the Spanish e-recruitment market. This year is crucial; we are going to improve our actual services and preparing new proposals to make a great difference in the market.

What can you say about the current traffic on your website? Except from Spain, are there visitors coming from any other countries?

Most of our traffic comes from Spain but we also have visitors from other countries such as Mexico, United States, France or from the UK.

What are the results of your mobile apps in comparison to your desktop version?

The mobile traffic represents nearly 40 percent of our monthly visits. Statistics show that smartphone user penetration rate is increasing and is expected to be 70% by the end of 2016. It is a huge opportunity for us to focus on our presence in the users’ devices and adapt all our services to this trend. We have developed our new responsive website and in the next few months we are going to analyze its impact in our mobile traffic.

Can you describe your target audience – job seekers and recruiters?

Recruiters using our services are both small/medium and big sized companies. Their main need is to seek and hire talents. They use Infoempleo because we have a large experience in the recruiting field and we have one of the biggest candidates’ CV databases of the country. But they also demand other services to improve their recruitment performance and they know we can help them. We also offer them our advertising and employer branding solutions.

What are the specific features that make your job board different from your national competitors?

Infoempleo is not only a job board where companies can post their position, it is more than that. It is a meeting point between candidates and companies with:

A company blog with more than 150.000 users every month
A B2B newsletter: the perfect channel to communicate with our clients
A candidate newsletter: designed to keep candidates informed of updates, new job opportunities and education options.
Social media profiles: with more than 115.000 Linkedin members, we have the biggest labor market profiles (Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter) in Spain within all the social networks.
Our publishing activity is a referent and we plan to continue giving interesting information for candidates and recruiters.
In addition of Infoempleo, we also run AvanzaentuCarrera.com , a complete education website where students can find careers orientation and a complete offer of studies.

As a job site, how do you attract your own candidates for your positions? How do you keep your employees engaged?

We use our website to hire candidates and we share our postings on social media.
Employees´ engagement is a key for our organization’s success so we try to keep them motivated, well-informed about what is happening, let them the opportunity to explain their point of view and give them flexibility to conciliate labor and family lives.

What are some of your best innovations since the company was founded? How do you get your employees to innovate on a daily basis?

We are constantly innovating to fulfill the labor market needs. We have grown very much since we first started to deliver job offers on newspapers. Now we are part of Vocento and that is a really important advantage because we can learn from other companies and beneficiate of global partnerships that the group already has. The main innovation was www.infoempleo.com because it started as the first job website.

Any of our employees can be connected to each other, all the information is shared so they can do their job anywhere. We try to optimize all our process in order to give an extraordinary user/client experience.

How is the Spanish online recruitment market doing today? Have you noticed any trends in the Spanish and/or in the global market?

In the past few years, we were struggling with our unemployment rate, now it stands at 21,6 per cent, so it is getting better but some work still needs to be done to ensure our recovery from a deep recession. Employers have not hired workers in many years, there were many dismissals and there was a deterioration of working conditions. Now the main focus is to improve the quality of the positions because there are more short-term contracts than permanent ones.

In the past months, companies have been publishing more and more, in fact we have more 18.000 national and international job offers live at the moment. We expect that this 2016 will bring more opportunities and we hope people registered as jobless would finally find their job.

What are some of the major challenges your company will have to face in the coming years? How do you see the future of the market and your company?

Our focus is to maintain our leading position in labor market and to be a referent for companies and candidates. To achieve that we have to deal with competitors, job cuts and new market demands. 2016 is going to be very challenging but we are sure that we will achieve our goals.

What are the next steps and projects for Infoempleo?

First of all, we are working on new services to fill the gap in the market. There will be a strengthened monitoring and evaluation of the strategy. Identify opportunities for improvement is also important and of course we would try to attract new clients and reach more candidates.