Name : Matt De Luca
Position : Managing Director
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Could you please introduce yourself?
My name is Matt and I’m a Managing Director of Job net. We started Job net about three years ago, one month ago was three year anniversary.
When did you arrive in Myanmar first? Why did you choose Myanmar?
I came here about four years ago, in January 2015. I came here with a company called Rocket Internet before operating in Myanmar and it’s a type of company that invest and growth online business and before they shut down, they operate three or four businesses here. Businesses in Myanmar are basically market places for jobs, cars, and real estate. That’s how I came here and with them I had a project six months only and I have met some people want to invest in here, Myanmar. So, we decided to do together. That’s how Job net was born in October 2015.
Could you please explain more about Job net?
I’m glad to answer this question because people confuse about what is Job net. Some people think it is an agency, but Job net is not an agency, it is an online recruitment advertising portal where any company can post their jobs in order to make a market available for people to apply and anybody as a candidate can visit Job net and register account, upload their CVs and apply for any jobs they would like. So, we do not actually call the candidate on the phone like an agency would do, agencies are basically organization was full of recruiter who call candidates and offer jobs and schedule interviews. Job net doesn’t do any of that, it’s an online platform where all these company log in themselves and manage their job advertisements by themselves.
What are your major responsibilities in Job net?
I just spend my time on a lot of jobs in sales, managing customer relationship and I like to work together with marketing in order to think of different ways to deliver powerful messages to our audiences for both candidates and companies. What kinds of services you provide for both employees and employers? For candidate, it is very simple, we do not really provide more than the ability for identify jobs they would not have found anywhere else and apply for this job directly. When they apply, their profiles go directly to that company they applied for, it does not come to us. And for companies, we built software for their recruitment partners in order to help them become efficient and many jobs are coming with their applications that come through. So, at the bottom, at the heart, we are actually in HR technology business. We are not really a recruitment agency that kind of business. We think very different approach because we believe that the future of Myanmar especially in business to busines and business technology.
Organizations will become a lot more professional in the way they operate internally. And now more international companies coming through the market, there are high level of pressure on most companies here to become more effective and efficient in the way they work. And the only way to do that or at least the most effective ways to do that is with the new technologies. And so, part of what we do in Job for employers is to help HR departments to adopt that technologies that we built ourselves to manage their applications then candidates can work more effectively. And we have been doing that for quite a number of years actually not just in Myanmar; we have done it for over 15 years in about 20 markets around the world. So, this is not a first time we doing it but this is the first time we come into Myanmar. And it is real privileges in opportunities for us to be here in what we have learnt from others countries and brought it here.
What are the major challenges facing your company?
I think there are a number of challenges as business is not always not easy in Myanmar. But I think there is pros and cons of doing business everywhere. I think the biggest challenge that we face most of the time is what we do actually here is nothing really new. If you want to go more develop market, business like Job net has been operating for 20 years. And so, the challenge we had here is, sometimes people do not fully understand what we do. So, there is also educational process, of actually, in a way of guiding company by understanding, the differences between traditional agencies and web portal, what is the value of portal, and why should I post a job if I get so many relevant applications all these things. But a portal brings more than just applications together.
In every market in the world, there is a job portal, they connect all people in the economy. And so, the value of Job net here is bring a lot of transparency of the job market. There you can only find one place, you can read about the company profile and what they do, why are they exciting work places, especially job seekers, candidates, starting a little a bit more attentions on what is the company actually do. So, that’s for job seekers. So, that is all the function learning how to you find a job. For company, a lot of company complain that they can’t find good people. It’s very challenging and competing the recruitment market. I also think that not all company are doing evenly they could to make their recruitment easier. At the bottom line, a lot of companies are complaining about how challenging the recruitment is, they do not do the right thing to make easier. And so, Job net can help with that. Massively because we have by far and large audience of people coming to our portal and they do not go everywhere else. Within 30 days, in one month, we attracted over 750,000, almost 1 million candidates to Job net. No agency, no company, can find themselves reach that amount.
What are the competitive strategies about Job net?
I think we have significantly out grown everybody else in the market because our laser focus strategy and execution power and I think understanding better of our customers’ wants. And luckily our IT team is based here, so we can grow very fast and quickly.
How do you view Myanmar job market in the forceable future?
I think there are certain sectors that will grow more than others. It is pretty clear how the government is trying everything they can and businesses are trying everything they can. It depends on which level you look at because there might be real growth on the blue color segments in term of factory workers and there might be not so high-level growth for experts and foreigners looking for work here.
Many successful companies have used Job net, how did you make your network wide and common.
It’s not different in most other businesses do, it called sales. And build trust.
Why do you decide to do Myanmar best employers award in first plane?
I think it is a beautiful project and a very special project because it has the power to change many businesses. We started this because we wanted to create that goes beyond the recruitment and nobody else is doing anything to reward and to stimulate some kinds of competition among businesses to be good employers. A lot of company puts a quite a bit of attention into being good employers, they try to prove that working in the environment and the learning development programs and it is very important to do that because we spend a lot of time in the work, so we deserve to be working in environment that cares for us, no matter which level we are. So, this is trying to achieve Myanmar employers to recognize officially. This been great and this year is a second year we had over 220 applications which is a lot. But also, we had a lot of competition because there are a lot more companies fighting for the same position. Job net is finding a sponsor of this and we have zero control over who win because we hire external judges, 24 judges here, that we paid and invited to judge the applications. So, we are extremely independent because the number one rule of this reward is credibility, we need the people to know what the rules are. We just create this platform brand and the application process but then we had to make sure all the judges are judging properly.
What are your future plans?
Our future plans are to continue serving our many customers as best as we can, continue doing what we have been doing in the last three years which is doing amazing products, even building more amazing relationships with our clients and continue serving both clients and white-collar professionals in Myanmar to help them find better jobs. So its services are group efforts, looking forward on a vision, or getting better and better, quarter after quarter, and hopefully converting more and more companies that still do not use online technology to use online technology because we generally care for them and we want to help them with that. And I think people and companies are daunt, not doing everything they could to make recruitment a lot easier for them. We also run serious and very successful offline events while we do online as a main business and building technology for other services. We also organize a lot of job fairs. The plan for next year is to make them a lot bigger than that actually.
How would you advise job seekers to get the best job for themselves?
Maybe it is because there are not enough resources out there to learn how to, although I do not think so because the power of the internet these days, you can find how to do anything on Google. I think finding a job if you break it down into from a hundred percent to, what is it determines whether you are going to find a job or not, is you divide into two reasons. And I think 60 percent or 70 percent is who you are, what your real potentials and skills are, and the other 30 percent is how you present yourself because that makes a huge impact. When you are going for interview, basically, you are selling yourself, you and your products. And a number one rule in product sales is that you have to know yourself and why the product fixes the certain needs. So that would be a good first step to begin with, actually start being bloody prepared. Number two is how to write your professional CVs.
The biggest mistake that most job seekers make, which I find so interesting, is 99 percent of people who apply for more than one job, doing with the same CVs. The problem with it is that, the CV is like a sales pitching away. I think you need to tailor your CV for every application because when you apply for a job here, you have the privilege and the advantage of knowing the requirements of their company. So you should tailor your CV in truthful way, you should not lie. But you can trick it in a way to make it look a lot more relevant for who you are. And these are very simple things but almost nobody does it. And then they wonder they do not get a call back from the company and why it is so hard to find a job. And these are very simple steps that they should be making that would make a huge difference to begin with. And then we can get later into interview skills and also being prepared about what the company does, what the job is about and having a professionally made CVs, tailored to that opportunity, to that job. And it is so easy to just read the job descriptions and know exactly what the company is looking forward. So before working in that company, you can read it, study it, understand it and connect it to who you are and how you are the best person to solve that problem.
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