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Qerja, a startup that promotes transparency in the workplace by posting company reviews and salary information, has been dubbed the Glassdoor of Indonesia. According to co-founder and CEO Veronika Linardi, it’s also responsible for the biggest job portal in the country – Jobs.id – which launched as a complement to Qerja earlier this year.

Speaking on stage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2015, Veronika shared a lot of intimate information about her entrepreneurial journey and the many struggles associated with work-life balance. In an offstage interview with Tech in Asia, she also shared some impressive growth figures and her plans to scale both Qerja and Jobs.id across the region.

Launched in April 2014, Qerja provides a strong counterpoint to the opaque – sometimes corrupt – corporate practices in Indonesia and Malaysia. Until the service launched, workers could only rely on word-of-mouth reviews and salary estimates about companies they were potentially interested in.

“At first, there was some shock [from companies reviewed on Qerja], but it all subsided because they began to understand the big picture,” Veronika tells Tech in Asia. “Some directors have actually come up and thanked me because now they know why they were losing good talent.”

“People aren’t always direct enough in exit interviews, so Qerja provides a lot of important feedback to companies,” she continues. “They figure out they weren’t comparing themselves to the right competitors, or maybe they were benchmarking too low. Money isn’t necessarily the most important factor, but now they can see the salary trajectory at [other companies].”

Veronika says that she’s never been threatened by an angry company, though her team has had to remove an undisclosed number of fake write-ups. The service employs a team of moderators that comb through every single entry, whether it’s a salary submission or a company review.

“All bad or all good [submissions] can be suspicious,” she says. “All bad can be a competitor, and all good can be the HR department.”

Qerja also doesn’t allow ads on the platform, and Veronika says they’re not considered a revenue channel for her startup at this time. Despite reaching users almost entirely organically, the co-founder says the site saw more than 12 million page views last month. Users have aggregated “hundreds of thousands of reviews” since launch, but she declined to break down the monthly and daily active user count.

From review site to portal

With a captive audience of users seeking insider information about companies across Indonesia and Malaysia, the stage was set to offer a more direct outlet for those who found themselves underemployed or simply curious about a career change. Jobs.id, which she co-founded in January this year, was the logical next step. She says:

“Companies that post job ads online often receive zero good applicants or hundreds of irrelevant candidates. This leads to a lot of no-shows for interviews and general disappointment in the recruitment market.”

Jobs.id ensures that companies using the service only connect with relevant candidates. They can view all of the applicants for free, but only pay to contact those who are a fit for the position. If none of the job seekers pique a company’s interest, they aren’t charged.

Veronika says Jobs.id became the number one job portal in Indonesia within seven months of launch, based on number of listings and active clients. She says that 20,000 applications are posted per day – that’s one every five seconds.

“We now see ourselves as an end-to-end career portal,” she says. “What should I study to get the job I want? How do I negotiate my salary? We can answer all of those questions and more.”

Reviewing the reviewer

The Qerja and Jobs.id teams – nearing 100 total members – are made up almost entirely of millennials, according to Veronika. How would they rank the company that brought satisfaction ranking to the region? A review for Qerja, on Qerja, gives the startup four out of five stars.

“More than talent, we look for people with a good heart,” Veronika says. “Working together with a team is like a marriage, there are good days and bad days, so it’s important to share values. We want to incentivize people for working hard, their career shouldn’t be a separate island.”

Veronika says that Qerja employees – and premium-tier users – can receive a variety of perks including free haircuts, Uber vouchers, and raffles that award coveted prizes like a Galaxy S6 Edge, for example. The startup also provides free lunch, dinner, and drinks to all members of its staff.

It might be hard to believe a review on the startup’s own review site, but if the above is true, those four stars sound justified.

So what’s next for Qerja and Jobs.id? Expansion, according to Veronika.

“We’re looking for strategic players that can help us penetrate the regional market,” she says. “Southeast Asia makes sense for us because of the close proximity. The beauty of our business is that the same backend can be scaled to many different countries. Apart from sales, everything can be done in Indonesia.”

The startup has raised an undisclosed amount of funding, most recently a series A round from SoftBank Indosat’s US$50 million fund.

This post Qerja sister startup Jobs.id receives 20k fresh applications a day appeared first on Tech in Asia.

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