Berlin-based HeyJobs announces €35m Series B and over 100,000 hires made for 2,500 customers
HeyJobs (https://www.heyjobs.co/) raised $47m in Series B financing led by Digital+ and FMZ ventures, with participation from existing investors Notion Capital, Heartcore Capital and Creathor Ventures. This is the largest financing round a career platform in Germany has ever received.
HeyJobs was founded by Marius Jeuck and Marius Luther in 2016 in response to Europe’s dramatically changing labor demographics: With the “boomer” generation nearing retirement, European employers are facing steep declines in available workforce. For instance, Germany alone is losing 500,000 workers annually. No wonder that German CEOs rank the “labor shortage” their #1 concern for growth.
HeyJobs helps employers recruit ‘essential talent’ across 100 different professions such as lorry drivers, nurses, or electricians. The company differentiates through their unique data set and proprietary machine learning algorithms. “Whilst 5 years ago, we could identify who is a nurse versus a driver, our AI has now learned to identify who is a qualified intensive care unit nurse that seeks to do 3 night shifts”, says Marius Luther, founder & CEO of HeyJobs. The vision of HeyJobs is to become the #1 European Career Platform for essential talent. “It’s crazy how we as a society have neglected the largest share of the workforce – 30 million alone in Germany, over 200 million essential talent in Europe – for decades. They deserve better.”
Today, the HeyJobs talent platform is used by hundreds of thousands of jobseekers as well as over 2’700 employers ranging from SMEs to the largest European employers. Their customers have made over 100’000 hires through HeyJobs to date totalling over €5bn in annual wages.
Marius Luther, founder & CEO: “We are proud of the way we support companies to better and more cost-effectively achieve their hiring goals. But what really moves me is that we changed the lives of over 100’000 people through finding their next great opportunity. In 2021, we were responsible for around 1% of all German hires. And while this is a nice proof of our relevance, it still feels like Day 1 in terms of the long term value we can create.”
“HeyJobs is very well positioned to become the international category leader for recruiting essential talent” says Patrick Beitel, founding partner and managing director at Digital+ Partners. “In combining an excellent team, a mature technology-driven organization and a product proposition that is building on two pillars, essential talent and employers, HeyJobs is ideally equipped to accelerate its growth in Germany, Europe and beyond.”
Michael Zeisser of FMZ Ventures, former chairman Alibaba Investments and an investor in numerous marketplaces explains his investment as: “HeyJobs is a leading next-generation company in the emerging Experience Economy; its purpose is to provide users the economic opportunity to realize their full human potential; it is a privilege to support this team and its mission.”
HeyJobs will use the funding to push the application of artificial intelligence in talent acquisition, supporting their mission of “helping everyone find the right job to live a fulfilling life.” With this at heart, HeyJobs is also setting best practices as an employer of their own. Recently recognised as the best tech employer in Berlin based on a Glassdoor rating of 4.7, the company has doubled its headcount in the past 12 months to 300 employees and is continually hiring both new and seasoned professionals across product, data science, engineering and business roles.
To support their mission, Dr. Katrin Suder joined as independent chairperson of HeyJobs Board of Directors. She has substantial experience as a board member and chair in listed and privately owned companies such as Cloudflare. Suder was appointed by German chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet to chair the German Digital Council in 2018. Prior to this, she was State Secretary in the German Ministry of Defense. She started her career and became senior partner at McKinsey & Company, where she was in charge of the German Public Sector Practice. In 2011, she published “Competitive Advantage: Skilled Workers”, a widely cited white paper on strategies for German companies to win in difficult macro-demographic times. “My career has been focused on data, technology, business, and policy, and HeyJobs is a company that is at the intersection of those areas,” said Suder. “I look forward to supporting this exciting and highly needed mission.”