Workeer Update: Q&A With Co-Founder David Jacob

Last year, our designer David Jacob launched Workeer, a platform that brings together employers and refugees looking for work in Germany. He even wrote about it for us here. Six months and more than 3700 registered public users later, we caught up with David to talk about Workeer’s progress and what the future holds for the project.

In your initial article, you said that you wanted Workeer to settle the doubts of employers. Do you feel that you’ve achieved this?

We’ve definitely reached the goal in some instances. In general, employers are happy that they can take one look at the site and easily see what qualifications people have, and see if there’s someone interesting for their vacancy. I think there are also employers who just look out of curiosity, because they’ve heard about Workeer, and then when they see that there are good candidates they end up employing someone, and the whole process is much simpler than they expected.

After the initial media coverage, how are you maintaining interest and attracting new employers to register?

Now it’s moved to networks, unions, and organizations, like the IHK, for example. They know about us, and when employers approach them and ask how they can employee refugees, these organizations can let them know about our platform and what we do. We want to work more closely with these organizations, and also with the government employment agency, the Arbeitsagentur.

In the future, we plan to follow-up when companies and organizations voice an interest. Articles are coming out every day about companies wanting to employ certain numbers of refugees, or presidents of unions saying they want to enforce initiatives for getting refugees into work. In these cases, we can follow up and say, hey, we have this website, do you want to work with us and offer your jobs with us?

On the other side of the platform, how are refugees finding out about Workeer?

I think it’s the same. The initiatives and organizations working with refugees know about us. They can tell them about Workeer, and suggest that they register. A lot of refugees find out about the platform independently, especially through Facebook. In recent months a lot of interaction has been from refugees themselves, and we get emails from people who perhaps can’t understand the German press coverage, but are aware of the concept and want to know more about what we do.

To help, we want to provide info material that can be displayed either where refugees are staying, or at their German classes. We also want to make the platform available in English, because that’s holding it back majorly right now. It’s just a technical matter. It’s been our plan from the beginning, but we haven’t had the financial resources to pay for the time and work required to put it into place.

Are the numbers of registered applicants and employers still increasing?

It’s slower than at the start, but while we haven’t had much press coverage for the last few months, the numbers are still increasing. I think that’s quite impressive. Just this morning we had seven new companies sign up. If we gain more press coverage, if we can communicate success stories, then I hope it’ll increase further.

What have been the challenges of managing the platform as a side project?

Until February, it was just me and Philipp. Mostly me. I received 4000 emails in the first six months. Just keeping up with them, answering as many as I could, was frustrating. You put in so much time and effort, but you can’t make everyone happy if you can’t respond to all the emails. There’s 7 of us now, mostly student volunteers, but the plan is to have a paid core team who can focus on Workeer completely. It’s been great having a bigger team: it feels like we can finally get back to people properly.

What’s next for Workeer?

We’re actively looking for funding. That’s the first step. We need funding to rebuild the platform, and then, when we rebuild it, we can implement new features. Right now, with the current technical infrastructure, we can’t do that. We’ve just launched our betterplace campaign, which will help us build the financial resources we need to execute everything that we have planned for the future, and develop a sustainable platform.

We plan to relaunch the website using a more scaleable, flexible and stable technical solution. We want to offer more support, offering legal documents and step by step guides, for example. We also want to build a way to track applications and hires. Right now this is a problems for us, in terms of communicating Workeer’s success, because we just don’t have exact figures for applicants being hired. Building these tools, and cooperating more with the initiatives who help refugees, to build a better service in the end: that’s the ultimate goal.

Because we want to make this is a sustainable project, we’ll also find ways to monetize it. But we will stay non-profit, that’s for sure. It’s not about becoming a millionaire, but about building a sustainable business that’ll be here for the foreseeable future, and can deal with the demand that’s there.