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Mihai Cepoi is the Founder and CEO of Jobful, Romania's first gamified recruitment platform. With a strong background in HR solutions and sales, Mihai previously worked at SAP, where he was recognized as the MVP for HR sales. In 2018, he left SAP to fully dedicate himself to Jobful. Under his leadership, Jobful secured a pre-seed investment of 250,000 euros in 2020 and an angel investment of 100,000 euros in 2019. The company was also the only Romanian participant in the SAP.io accelerator in Berlin and was invited to the Numa Accelerator in New York.

Jobful leverages gamification to revolutionize the recruitment process, helping HR departments attract talent more effectively. The start-up simplifies hiring processes, making it easier for companies to connect with the right candidates.

1. What ‘aha’ moment led to the founding of Jobful?

The very first ‘aha’ moment we had was one year prior to launching Jobful. The team at that time delivered gamification projects for HR processes and we witnessed a spectacular transformation for a large Telco company in their onboarding process. From 30% churn - people leaving during the first month - to 0% churn and a very happy group of new hires. That’s when we knew the engagement models we’re creating have a large business impact, not a marginal one.

2. What was your drive back then, and what change did you aim to make?

In terms of drive and motivation, it has always been a mix. The people centric mindset is a core part of our culture and business, so the idea of making a difference for professionals in their career endeavors is a big part of our drive. In today’s very competitive landscape, placing ourselves at the forefront of potentially worldwide innovation is also a big part of our internal motivation. For the last couple of years, investing in projects focusing on the long-term social good and prosperity of vulnerable communities has been an amazing addition to our drive and motivation.

The change we aim to make has been defined as an employment manifesto based on principles. These include: people above processes, technology that empowers people, harmony over power, respect for the counterpart, equal opportunity by design and ethical recruitment over anything else.

3. How does Jobful's platform contribute to modern recruitment practices, and what specific market gap does it address?

We identified a missing puzzle piece in employment processes across the global market. For more than three decades now (since PeopleSoft launched the first technology for talent acquisition), the innovation in the area of recruitment has been incremental. We still rely on “Applicant Tracking Systems”, on a process centric approach, mapping professionals to our models. This also means that candidates are treated as data sets and recruitment teams are firefighting business needs as positions to be filled. And what we know for sure is that nobody wants to be a data set on a topic as important as work or career.

Today, we hire less than 1% of the profiles we pay job boards to share with us and in most cases ignore the other 99% of professionals interested to join our organizations. Yet we’re surprised our brand as an employer is suffering.

(stat) 65% of candidates don’t receive consistent communication.

The missing puzzle piece we developed is a talent community platform. With Jobful, we enable employers to empower talent. We make sure all candidates receive consistent communication, we make sure all interested professionals join the employer community, we diversify how professionals can engage with employers (through courses, challenges, events, awards, groups) and we mitigate the dependency risks for sourcing. In a few words, we transform employment from a burden for both parts (recruitment teams and candidates) into a connection process.

4. From an investor’s perspective, how did the platform grow since its previous raise in 2020?

It’s been a bit more than 4 years since that previous raise. In the meantime we’ve been through a pandemic with market freeze, a large military conflict in eastern Europe, economical instability, pivoted twice and the list goes on.

During these years we’ve been strong (resilient) enough to:

• Rebuild the entire team from 3 members to 16
• Double the business for 3 consecutive years, now getting close to 400K in annual recurring revenue
• Deploy the technology for large enterprises (Regina Maria, Raiffeisen, Publicis)
• Launch international projects (Wyndham Hotels EMEA, Startup Refugees in Finland)
• Build a highly scalable model for expansion
• Develop strategic partnerships with NESsT, IKEA Foundation, BCR and EBRD
• Maintain 0 churn rate (happy customers)

Maybe just as importantly for investors in today’s market conditions, we demonstrated agility and resilience during incredibly difficult times.

5. What’s your specialization in terms of company type, roles you support and geography? - How are you different from other recruiting platforms?

The gamification framework and expertise, deeply embedded in our proprietary technology, is today our strongest differentiator. As mentioned above, other recruitment platforms or solutions are still iterating on process centric models often ignoring the candidate experience or at least putting it in second place (best case scenario). Any expert in recruitment can tell you this process is about people. We enable employers to make the process about people and the impact on business outcomes is spectacular.

6. How does Jobful guide and empower HR departments to make informed decisions about their recruitment strategies?

Our technology provides an amazing opportunity for HR leaders, enabling their organization to make people processes a critical part of their business success. In most cases recruitment is rather tactical not strategic, the volume of work is based on requests (we need to hire / replace x people as soon as possible) which led to this firefighting approach.

In a very unpredictable future, after COVID recession, economical instability and generative AI driven fears, the solution can only be preparation and agility. This is exactly what our solution offers to employers, a model to build, grow and engage talent communities, enabling foresight instead of forecast. A broader perspective regarding possibilities and opportunities instead of an estimation that things will be more or less the same / predictable.

7. How does Jobful address the inclusivity framework nowadays?

When we discuss inclusivity we have to look at the entire ecosystem. Inclusivity has a strong pillar in people & culture processes, another pillar regarding infrastructure including technology, another pillar in education and the list can go on.

On our end, we’re very proud with our progress over the years on this topic:

• We have a very diverse team with representatives from every single active generation in the workforce market and representatives from different key groups (people with disabilities, from minority groups). This broadens our perspective and offers us insights in everything we do.
• We reengineered the entire interface of our platform in order to make our platform accessible to people with visual impairment (WCAG 2 international standards). It's very sad to say, but only 3% of the Internet is for everyone. The other 97% is only for the people who have the fortune to see. We’re very proud to be part of the 3% today.
• We added a step in the selection process called the matching system. Professionals profiles are anonymized and can only be unlocked after both parties have confirmed. This eliminates by design any potential bias on gender, age, vulnerability, disability, etc. leading to an equal opportunity framework for hiring.

8. What advisors do you have?

Our current advisors are experts on key pillars for Jobful’s growth. We work with Dr. Mirko Knaak for AI/ML strategy, with Emanuela Modoran for grants, Mihaela Toader for financial planning, with Jaco Fok for innovation and different mentors from our ecosystem.

9. Do you have a mentor or figure whom you admire and draw inspiration from?

I admire my colleagues and their dedication to make everything happen within our organization. I admire our mentors and advisors. Generally I crowdsource inspiration from every context possible.

10. Why should investors consider being part of Jobful's journey?

There are plenty of reasons an investor should consider joining our journey. Starting from the financial incentive and return of investment, that’s part of the definition for “investor”. I would add some other potential motivators:

• They work in the industry and their experience, network and passion can contribute to our growth and implicitly to better returns
• They empathize with our mission (and values) and want to contribute to its success
• They want to be part of an amazing entrepreneurial experience and maybe one day join as part of the team too
• They understand the importance of empowering vulnerable people and want to contribute
• They believe Romania deserves better representation in the global startup scene and see the opportunity just like we do

I believe the list is a bit longer, the point being there’s plenty of reasons to join our journey regardless of the capacity.

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