Hiring is one of the biggest challenges a company will face, akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack, with job posts yielding thousands of applicants, only a handful of whom are qualified. Sifting through them is a drain on time and resources for employers.
To solve this pain point, Tim Wijaya, a Brown University senior from Indonesia, has launched Kerja.io, a platform that pre-screens candidates and employers to create a network aiming to make better matches for everyone involved.
Although the platform is open to anyone, Kerja is primarily focused on helping Indonesian companies in the tech, finance and consulting sectors find qualified talent, initially targeting Indonesian students.
Using mostly manual processes, the Kerja team will speak to the human resource departments of companies on the platform to get a better sense of what they seek. On the other end, Kerja intensely screens applicants before admitting them to the platform, with a current acceptance rate of around 30%.
“If you go to a regular job portal, what happens is you drop your resume and you send your application to somebody that will do the first round of screening,” Wijaya told Rhode Island Inno. “What we do is basically take that first round of screening and just apply it to everyone on the platform.”
The process has led to a job acceptance rate for employers on Kerja that is roughly 10 times higher than that of traditional job boards, according to Wijaya.
Wijaya first came up with the idea for Kerja after losing his summer internship in 2020 due to the pandemic. He realized that many of his peers in Indonesia faced a similar fate due to travel restrictions, while many companies in the growing tech region were struggling to find qualified talent.
Wijaya launched Kerja last November with a batch of 40 companies, largely targeting tech and venture capital firms in Indonesia seeking talent.
Since then, the company has grown to 200 companies on the platform including TikTok, Citigroup, Bain and Strategy&. The company has also worked with large and well-funded Indonesian startups like OVO and GOJEK, considered the Uber of Southeast Asia and also founded by a Brown alumnus.
There are also about 3,000 students on the platform with application volume taking off in recent months.
“We initially started with Indonesian students in the U.S. because this demographic is really attractive to Southeast Asian companies as they really want people that understand the market and can speak the language but also have a degree from Berkeley,” Wijaya said. “But our goal has always been to unite the best and brightest minds in the region, regardless of where they go to school. In recent months, we’ve made efforts to expand into other geographic markets.”
He said that there are about 6,000 Indonesian undergraduates that study in the U.S. and estimates that about three-fourths of them will return to the country following graduation. Wijaya also said that the Southeast Asian market, particularly Indonesia, is starting to become attractive for investors.
High-profile venture capital firms like Sequoia and Lightspeed now have offices in Southeast Asia, and roughly $6 billion in venture capital funding was invested in the region in the first quarter of 2021.
Over the next several months, Wijaya’s goal is to hone in on the Indonesian market, which he knows well, to prove the company’s proof of concept.
Wijaya said Kerja is planning to expand the platform into universities in Indonesia and begin testing monetization strategies.
“We want to create the best product with the best companies and match them with the best students,” he said.
