Interview with Jobup.ch the leading job board in French-speaking Switzerland8 min read

We recently interviewed jobup.ch one of our 887 job board partners and the leading job board in French-speaking Switzerland. We now know more about its positionning, its audience and its products. What we can say is that Jobup.ch is a great place to work where the atmosphere is friendly and where employees get many advantages. The website also gave us its insight about the Swiss e-recruitment market.

• Can you provide a brief history of jobup.ch and its main milestones?

The platform jobup.ch was founded in 2000. In 2013, the two companies Jobup SA and jobs AG merged to become JobCloud SA, which today runs jobup.ch, jobs.ch, ALPHA.CH, Topjobs.ch and other specialised platforms.

• How would you describe your company culture and core values?

Our core mission is to bring recruiters and candidates together and we develop efficient recruitment solutions. We successfully grow in this digital world thanks to a very dynamic, friendly and young environment.

• According to SimilarWeb, jobup.ch is the Swiss #2 for jobs and employment right after Indeed.ch and before Jobs.ch. What can you tell us about the current positioning of jobup.ch in the Swiss market?

With a 15-year experience our position is very strong on the Swiss market for our 2 main platforms: jobup.ch leading for all positions in French-speaking Switzerland and jobs.ch in German-speaking Switzerland. We have 1/3 of the active population who is looking for jobs on the platform. We also keep an eye on the international market and release regularly new functionalities, tools and services to always be a step ahead: for example, from the beginning of 2015, we allow candidates to apply from the mobile app.

• What can you tell us about the current traffic on your website? Are there any other countries represented by your visitors except from Switzerland?

We currently have more than 2.5 million visits each month thanks to 700’000 unique visitors (about 70% of the working population). We also have traffic coming from neighbouring countries and regions, such as France, which is a particularity of the Swiss job market.

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

In 2016, we will reach 50% of our total traffic from mobile devices. Candidates now visit our platform from mobile apps and website and it’s a strong part of our developments and strategies. Since January 2015, candidates can even apply from their mobile and already 15% of them do so!

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

We are a generalist platform, meaning that our mission is to target all profiles and position needs. Regarding our candidates, we have a large mix: they are blue or white collars, highly or less highly-educated worker, graduates, managers or skilled workers. Moreover, thanks to our CV database, many jobseekers that have a completed profile are currently employed in an active position and are just opened to new opportunities.

Regarding recruiters, they are also from all sectors and company size. We have SME as well as big enterprises, international companies and intergovernmental organizations. Recruiting agencies are also working with our platform.

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

We are working on several aspects to be attractive: we develop user-friendly and up-to-date tools for candidates and recruiters and we always try to integrate the latest technologies.

Every year we launch a brand awareness study to collect valuable feedbacks from users. The top advantages that come first to candidates’ mind is that the platform has a large variety of qualitative job ads; that the tools are easy to use and that the platform is the best known. Services such as mobile apps, our automatic CV generator, or the opportunity to complete an online profile that recruiters can access, really seduce them.

On the recruiters’ side, our local and regional implementation and our 15 years of experience are much appreciated. We support them in their recruitments with complementary services such as the ad posting, our CV database or employer branding solutions and they always benefit from the latest updates we develop. We definitely have the focus of our success on a healthy and sustainable relationship with our clients.

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

At JobCloud, we give a great importance to the employer branding matters starting with small actions, such as for example a present given to everybody for his/her birthday. Each year we also organize several trips and parties for the team, and every employee gets great insurance policies. Many benefits are part of our daily life, so we recently developed a corporate website to present the company and to attract candidates and keep our employees engaged (www.jobcloud.ch).

Our young and dynamic team spirit is really felt and appreciated by the candidates that we meet on the recruiting events as well as by the recruiters we work with.

• JobCloud SA offers a number of benefits to its employees such as car leasing, training, team lunch, massages and insurance. What is the most popular benefit among your employees? Can you give us some insights of what it’s like to work at jobup.ch? Are there any other advantages of working at jobup.ch that you would like to mention?

Some of the most popular benefits are the massages, given once a month or a sportive boot camp every week, the birthday and jubilee presents, the high participation to any kind of complementary training or, simply, the free fresh fruits that are at our disposal everyday. And these benefits are still evolving every year.

Working at JobCloud is like being part of a big family of 140 members. No one is just a number: everybody knows each other and work with great synergies, even if our teams are split between Zurich and Geneva.

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

Some of the greatest functionalities were for example the CV database, created from the beginning in 2000 (even 3 years before LinkedIn!). We can think also of the applications via mobile, which is a great step forward for recruitment and very new for our market.

• Your website includes a lot of videos – company presentations, tutorials for job seekers, employer interviews etc. What is the impact of video format in driving visitors to your website? How do you envision video for the future of online recruitment?

We are convinced that videos convey much better messages and more emotions than texts or even pictures. Furthermore, we work a lot with videoconferences (webinars) to give information and training.

Regarding the consideration of video into the recruitment process, we’ve just started to integrate video interviews for our own recruitments. The results are very positive and the video is an important topic for our future projects.

• Jobup.ch sponsored a sailing team on the M2 Speed Tour. Can you tell us what this event is about and what the experience was like?

We have been supporting this great sailing team from 2012 until 2015 and it has been a great experience. The team approached us for the sponsoring and as this sport share great values, it totally fits our young and sportive state of mind. It was also a nice opportunity for our clients too whom we invited to participate to a sailing discovery experience on the Lake Geneva (Lac Léman).

• Over a year ago, in June 2014, jobup.ch posted a very uncommon job ad that targeted children. It turned out to be part of an awareness campaign on forced child labor for Terre des hommes, an international organization advocating children’s rights. Can you tell us more details about the reasons and results of such an action?

We were contacted by Terre des hommes for this campaign and we were particularly sensitive for their projects and honored to be part of them. The campaign was launched on June 12^th, World Day Against Child Labor, and coincided with an international meeting happening in Switzerland dedicated to children rights. They wanted to communicate widely to raise awareness of child labor. They could then benefit from the visibility we have on the platform and post their provocative job ads “Little Slaves Needed”.

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

A large majority of recruiters use online tools to hire their future employees. After the Swiss National Bank dropped the Euro cap at the beginning of the year, the industry has changed and evolved, but globally, the Swiss online recruitment market is a prolific and dynamic market.

• 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?

One of the major challenges we focus on every day is to maintain our position as a leader on the market. To do so, we have a lot of projects to keep on innovating and improving our tools, services and clients (candidates and recruiters) relationship.

To us, and it is quite clear that the future of recruitment (and then of our company) is mobile oriented. It’s an important step to take into consideration to remain competitive and to satisfy the market’s needs.

• What are the next steps and projects for jobup.ch?

Among others, we will have new mobile apps, some new managing features for jobseekers and recruiters, etc. We are also actively working on creating content for candidates and recruiters and many other projects.