Jobbatical Raises $2 Million, Plans To Expand In Asia

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Jobbatical is a marketplace for short-term tech gigs, matching those who wish to take a work sabbatical with employers seeking potentially short-term but skilled hires. The company helps employers looking for experienced professionals, and individuals either working as freelancers or just seeking a working sabbatical to use and develop their skills. Jobbatical connects top tech talent to employers across the globe for short term jobs. Below is our interview with Karoli Hindriks, Founder & CEO of Jobbatical:

Q: How did Jobbatical start? What is your startup story?

A: The beginning of Jobbatical was from my own experience of a need that wasn’t being addressed by any existing company. When I was 29 I had already built a successful career in the Baltics, and I wanted to use my skills somewhere else in the world – join a team in a different cultural environment and help them with what I had learned by that time. But all the cross-border work opportunities I could find were for farm work or teaching English. I realized there was so much untapped potential in highly skilled professionals ready to travel, and someone needed to build a platform to connect these people with international teams. So a little bit more than a year ago, in November 2014, I decided to gather a team of my own and build it ourselves. Jobbatical started as three Estonians working in a tiny office in Tallinn on cardboard boxes – now our team is five times the size with members from three continents (and quickly growing even more) and we’ve helped people from around the world make their work and travel dreams come true.

Q: You’ve recently raised a $2 million funding round, what are your plans?

A: As a very large number of the employers using Jobbatical are in Asia, we will be establishing a new branch there, in Singapore. We’ll also be growing our team and continuing to develop our product.

Q: What are your key features?

A: Our career adventures are for tech, creative, and business professionals with a few years of experience under their belt, who are ready to use their skills somwhere different, while exploring a new city and culture. These global opportunities are paid positions – from coding to marketing to design – that last from 6 to 12 months (most are one year). We’re constantly scouting out new opportunities, and at any given moment you can explore jobbaticals in 30+ countries on our site.

On the employer side, we offer teams in every corner of the globe access to the best talent the world has to offer. The 30,000+ members of the jobbatical community are ready and willing to relocate to join an exciting new team, no matter the distance. This is incredibly valuable to employers, especially those in small or remote countries where hiring locally is limiting, and attracting international talent alone is a challenge. Another key feature for employers is that our Jobbatical copywriters personally craft each listing to be highly appealing to an international audience.

Q: How would you convince the reader to start using Jobbatical?

A: One of the best parts of building Jobbatical is that the most common reaction when people hear about what we do is not “Why should I use your product?” but rather, “Why didn’t I know this existed earlier??” There are so many amazing cities around the globe, and adventurous Millennials are not content to just experience them as a tourist. When given the chance to continue to build their career while also seeing the world, the type of person Jobbatical is created for – curious, open-minded, daring – usually jumps at the chance. If someone needs extra convincing, it’s often enough for them to take a look at the opportunities we have avaible, from vibrant Barcelona to tropical Malaysia to hidden gems like Tallinn, Estonia (our home city), there’s usually something that catches their eye.

Q: What were the main challenges you faced in developing the company?

A: If you are building a platform for a model that did not exist before then there are constantly things to work on. We need to convince employers that it is worth taking the extra time and effort to hire someone from another country. In certain countries – mainly the USA – the legal barriers to bringing in foreign talent are so steep that it is very difficult for innovative companies to build global teams to make their global products succeed. The biggest impact of this is not actually on Jobbatical – as we can simply focus on different countries – but on the countries themselves. How can they expect their businesses and economies to keep up in this increasingly global world if there are miles of red tape and bureaucracy between amazing teams and amazing talent?

We are doing something that has never been done before, so there are constant decisions to be made – many of which are challenging. But none of the challenges are big enough to shadow the joy of people already changing their lives through our platform like Thiago or Nikki. When I as a founder hear those stories then all the challenges are forgotten.

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