Rocket Internet, a Berlin based company in broadening its already wide portfolio of companies has launched Everjobs, a career-listings platform.
Everjobs, which is already live in Sri Lanka will tackle emerging markets in Asia and Africa and plans to expand rapidly.
Ronald Schuurs, Everjobs co-founder, said that Rocket Internet decided to take on job listings after the success of its siteWork.com.mm, which began operating in Myanmar last year.
Despite launching with little fanfare and minimal marketing,Work.com.mm now claims about one million page views per month, with about 140,000 unique visitors.
Rocket Internet claims this makes it the top jobs site in Myanmar.
Like other Rocket Internet companies, including real-estate listings site Lamudi and car classifieds platform Carmudi, Everjobs will first enter what Schuurs calls “frontier markets,” or countries where Internet penetration is still very low.
By going in as a first-mover in those areas, Rocket Internet hopes to cement market leadership as more people get online.
Everjobs will launch an Android app later this month to target users who access the Internet mainly through their smartphones.
Everjobs currently has 1,000 job listings in Sri Lanka.
Schuur said the site decided to launch there first because the company believes Sri Lanka is overlooked by other tech companies. Everjobs already faces competition there, however, in the form of established job portals like topjobs, CV, and Sri Lanka Job Bank.
With the launch of its Sri Lanka site, Everjobs joins seventeen other companies in Rocket Internet’s Asia Pacific Internet Group (APACIG) and Africa Internet Group (AIG).
Schuur said Everjobs will follow a similar expansion plan to Carmudi and Lamudi.
“Within these countries and on a more regional scale, you can say we know quite a bit about how to do business in some of these frontier markets, which is totally different than doing business in the U.S. or Europe, so knowledge sharing is one of the most important things,” Schuurs told TechCrunch.
“If you look at the tech side of things, depending on the country you don’t want to have a very complicated website that takes up a lot of broadband. We can do this well, because we’ve been doing it for a while.”
A schedule of country launches has yet to be finalized, but Schuurs said Everjobs’ first African country will probably be Cameroon, according to the report by TechCrunch.