Ambition A.M. meets Karoli Hindriks, co-founder of global relocation platform Jobbatical, to discuss what it takes to successfully pivot a business according to market needs.
Karoli Hindriks can still remember the angst she felt the night before she had to tell a room full of investors that her international recruitment agency, Jobbatical, was in desperate need of a pivot.
How was she going to break the news that – after nearly five years in operation – the data was now pointing her and the team in a different direction?
“It felt like failure if I’m being very honest with you,” Hindriks, now 43, says.
The decision was too obvious to ignore, however, because she says the problem she was trying to solve when launching Jobbatical in 2014 turned out to not be the problem at all.
“What we learned from our [half a million] customers was that their biggest problem in international hiring was not finding those people, but actually getting them into the country,” she adds.
In 2019, Jobbatical pivoted to becoming a global relocation platform – using tailored technology to streamline visa and relocation processes for companies and their employees — and has since relocated some 15,000 workers and families to and from 43 of the world’s biggest cities within industries such as AI, engineering, healthcare and finance.
In 2020, it created the world’s first Digital Nomad Visa alongside the Estonian government, which has now been implemented in 59 countries.
The momentum is far from over, she says, especially with her next ambitious mission being to correct the talent shortage here in the UK.
Spotting an opportunity
As we sit and chat about all the challenges that come with the pivot of any business, one thing becomes clear – the Estonian-born entrepreneur is no stranger to opportunity.
As a graduate student in Mountain View, California, the future of her entrepreneurial career became more than clear.
“Why in the world is Silicon Valley able to create companies that change industries in such high quantities compared to other regions in the world?” she recalls asking herself.
The answer she was looking for, she says, was that skilled workers are rarely ever born and bred all in one place.
“I realised that it’s not that people are just born smarter there, it’s that smart people circle the globe to get there and help build those companies,” she says.
Listening to the data
There was enough buzz to keep Jobbatical running as it was, she says, but the real potential was discovered once she learned to read between the lines.
In the year prior to the pivot, Hindriks had spent seven per cent of costs on an immigration relocation arm of the business, and when that arm returned nearly half of the business’s overall revenue, the need to make it the priority was evident.
“It’s really hard to work on something that’s not working.”
Karoli Hindriks
“After we pivoted the company… it was clear that this is what we’re building, this is the road map, this is what we want to get to next quarter [and] quarter after that – suddenly, you saw the excitement.”
What’s next for the UK?
In just under a year, the UK became one of Jobbatical’s biggest markets, and Hindriks — who has now just moved to London herself — says it’s due to the need for serious intervention when it comes to immigration policies and easy access to international talent.
The UK’s perceived skills shortage is a constant theme of industry leaders.
A recent survey by Jobbatical of over 200 senior business leaders also highlighted that over half believe that the current immigration policies in the UK are “harmful” to businesses, with nearly six in 10 saying UK businesses need more international workers for growth.
“If you look at the maths, what is needed and what the policy enables, they are not matching and that’s something that I believe that the next year we can improve,” Hindrik says.
Businesses cannot stay competitive if they cannot attract and retain the talent they need, she adds, and most of the time that talent is found overseas.
The commitments from the new government to invest in education and training programmes will “be central to restoring a steady stream of talent to UK industry,” Hindriks says, but only time and effort will tell what’s next for the UK’s talent ecosystem.
“We also need an ambitious and clear plan to attract skilled international talent, one area that has been significantly damaged by recent government policies designed to cut immigration,” she says.
CV
Name: Karoli Hindriks
Company: Jobbatical
Founded: 2014
Staff: 80
Title: CEO and Co-Founder
Age: 41
Born: Tallinn, Estonia
Lives: London, UK
Studied: Estonian Business School (International Business Administration), Singularity University (Graduate Studies Program)
Talents: Wakesurfing, cold water swimming, show dancing
Motto: “Trust the process”
Most known for: TED talk on why the passport needs an upgrade has been translated into fifteen languages | Becoming the youngest officially recognised inventor in Estonia | Founding Jobbatical
First ambition: Becoming an entrepreneur
Favourite book: Patty McCord “Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility” and Richard Branson’s “Losing My Virginity”
Best piece of advice: Building a vision is a bit like rock climbing. The main thing is not to look down since you may get dizzy. Just move forward, keep solving a challenge at a time.