Why online job searches are winning over Cambodia’s youth

SPONSORED: Ahead of the company’s upcoming career fair at Phnom Penh’s Aeon Mall on 25 June, Everjobs Asia CEO Gijs Verheijke breaks down the benefits of taking your job search online

Could you tell me a little bit about what makes Everjobs distinct from similar services?
I think a big thing is that being from Europe, having our European investors, one thing is organisational skills. Some of the other job sites that are here, some of our other markets here, started basically in a garage or bedroom. And we bring a bit more professionalism to the market.
The quality of the platform is that it’s completely mobile ready – it doesn’t matter what device you use to go to Everjobs, it automatically adjusts to it. And another thing that we’re really developing is matching. We still sometimes do services like pre-select applications, but we want to do that ultimately by computer with AI basically, that learns which jobs, which profiles fit together, and which ones were successful.
And as soon as you post a job, instead of having to wait for applications, you’ll still get applications of course, but you can also get a number of CVs that are recommended to you automatically. And the other way around – when you create your CV or upload your CV it lets you instantly get a number of jobs that fit you, which makes it much easier to find relevant results.
Otherwise you have to search through these three and a half thousand jobs, right. It’s much easier – and that’s where technology is going now to be able to recommend those jobs.
What is the early adoption of employers and job seekers looking online instead of through traditional media? Has there been much resistance?
By being online, you automatically pre-select a slightly younger demographic – I think our average age is 26 – and it goes from 25-36 – that is the majority. But above that there’s just a lot of people that are still gradually being introduced to the internet by their kids, so that’s a place where there’s still growth and development to be had.
It becomes especially clear when you go to other cities, where quite a lot of people have heard of Everjobs or online jobs searches in general, but they don’t believe yet that it will work there. They say that people don’t really use the internet in that way, and it’s up to us to convince everyone that that’s not true. We’re still at the beginning at the whole cycle.
You’ve said in the past that job sites bring increased transparency to the whole process – can you talk a little about some of the other advantages of moving online?
It’s much easier to get a broader audience – the only thing that could compete is a newspaper, but that’s old-fashioned and it’s not targeted – people are not going to pick up a newspaper that often specifically to look for jobs, and our website is only for jobs.
So on the job seekers’ side it’s a way better solution to cast a wider net and not having to figure out who to contact in each of the companies to get your CV over there.
And for companies the benefit is a little bit similar, where before you would have CVs being dropped off in person, being mailed in, maybe sometimes sent by email. And now you have them all in one place, where our platform has functions like favouriting, messaging directly to job seekers, rating them, sharing them with the other people in your team, that make it a lot more efficient to keep track of who’s in the running for the different jobs.