Founder's advice. Julia Nesterets, co-founder Hotwork.ru

The Founder’s Boards once again acquaint Megamind’s readers with the experience of developing a wide variety of projects and products, told by the people directly responsible for their creation.

Today's advice is from the co-founder of the HR-platform Hotwork.ru Julia Nesterets. Julia says that Hotwork is a tool for career takeoff and a job aggregator from across the Internet. Unusually in the project of Julia and the fact that they and the team independently prepare various materials, articles and videos aimed at facilitating the search for work and dreams and teaching the applicant useful skills during the interviews.

Entry into the market with strong competitors

We went to a fairly dense market - a vacancy aggregator - where there are both foreign players and domestic ones that have been successfully operating for years. But it did not stop us.

If the market is not new and there are competitors, create a working tool, but find your UTP, invent new unique features that your user really needs. Create additional value, and users will prefer you to more “mature” competitors.

How to invent a UTP?

Yes, it is an uneasy process. Someone with the generation of ideas, there are no problems, someone this case is difficult.
')
I recommend digging into the user's state, putting yourself in his place and thinking, what else can make his life easier in the perspective of your product? What are the problems with your user? How can they be solved?

In our example, I will demonstrate the course of thought. Analyzing the situation on the market and the state of today's job seeker (it is hard to find a job), we came to the conclusion that applicants' resumes, as a rule, do not narrate the fact that they do not contain the information that will hook the employer. As a result, we shot a video with tips on "How to create an effective resume . "

Users enthusiastically perceived this material. But, looking through the resumes that are sent to us by mail, we understand that the problem is not solved or is solved poorly, because applicants create their resumes, as a rule, using the resume designer on one of the job search sites. And it is these designers who set the specific format and fields to fill out, which, from the height of my 5 years of experience, the HR directors do not display the necessary information about the candidate.

Therefore, we created our resume designer, which has the following advantages:
1) it is short, it takes only 10 minutes to create an information summary
2) the fields and accents of our designer focus on the achievements and advantages of each of the candidates.

Another example of our UTP is a unique tool for literal rehearsal of an interview . The problem of applicants is the lack of knowledge and inability to present themselves correctly at the interview. This tool helps them hone their skills and probably know how to answer the most common questions of recruiters.

It is worth noting that such creative approaches to solving the problems of users also get good word of mouth. After all, it is no secret that people love to share information, which increases their self-esteem and status.

PR one thing and earn another

You need to clearly understand your audience and your business model.

We have two types of audience, which are equally important for different parameters. The first are partners, job search sites, with whom we cooperate and who pay us money for traffic. It is important that our traffic converts well on the partner side.

The second are applicants who literally use our site absolutely free of charge, but it is they who generate us profit.

Based on this, we spend 80% of our resources on applicants, and the partners are satisfied with our quality.

Customer focus

Tune in to the client. Think of it with performance metrics, not just yours.

At the stage of attracting a partner, make sure that your product is of high quality and you have something to offer. If the customer is reluctant to negotiate, offer a free test. Your task is to kill the quality of services of your competitors because the client’s budget is not dimensionless. Therefore, you need to achieve a redistribution of the budget in your direction. And here it is necessary to conduct a detailed analysis of what the client receives from competitors, at what price, with what efficiency.

The last indicator is difficult to get. But after discussing the test results, you can quite easily ask for a comparison with the closest competitors without absolute figures, as a percentage. Having received good results, the client will have nothing left to do but switch to you. If, however, we failed to outperform the competitors in some indicator, you still won - you know which indicator you are not yet up to. You and cards in hand. Think about how to increase this indicator.

When the client is already yours, do not relax. Win-win strategy

Always work on the "win-win" principle. And not on the principle of "pays, well, we will squeeze while pays." This is always a winning tactic of behavior, especially in the CIS market, where customer focus so far, unfortunately or fortunately for us, is not common.

Get your customers end metrics by which they evaluate you and competitors. Request this data in a weekly / monthly cut. Improve your performance. So that it does not come as a surprise to you if the partner decides to stop working with you. At this stage, to keep a partner is more difficult.

Keep your finger on the pulse of market conditions. If a crisis is coming, your partners have begun to earn less, look for the possibility of some additional “buns” for partners in cooperation with you. If you have the opportunity to "move" at a price, move. Thereby you will get a bigger piece of partner’s money, because Your offer will be more profitable than the competitors and for partners it will be cost optimization. We did just that. We went to work in rubles, when the dollar began to rise sharply, while also reducing the price. Bottom line: we lost in price, but won on the back. Both sides win.

And, of course, the team

Our project is a year and a half. Of course, for the first six months we worked on everything together with a partner, attracting freelancers for one-off work. Now we have a few people again - only 4 people in the permanent team.

But what would you like to emphasize - keep a constant connection with the team, even if they work remotely, as in our case. Describe your long-term goals, share them with the team, make plans for them and monitor their implementation. Discuss the results of the work. Pay bonuses when fulfilling a plan. In other words, maximally involve and infect with your idea everyone who somehow participates in your project. So you get a much better result.

Editorial note: if you have a desire to participate in the “Founder’s Tips” section, write to us at editor (at) megamozg.ru