Jan-Philipp Arps, co-founder of Employchain

The idea behind Employchain was pitched for the first time in 2018 at Sigma Technology Open Hackaton at Jönköping University One of Jönköping’s major challenges in the labour market is the “human capital flight” of graduate students migrating towards bigger cities in Sweden. We have developed the idea of building a mobile app to facilitate the match and connect students to local companies by making job search funnier and easier. The long-term goal was to boost the local economy. After receiving support from Science Park Jönköping and ALMI Företagspartner, Employchain went through the 2-years Incubator program and launched the app’s first version in Spring 2022.

“Employchain is like a combination between Tinder and LinkedIn”.

An app that radically simplifies the matching process between companies and candidates by replacing written CVs with short, relevant profiles meeting the requirements for a specific job ad. At the same time, it only matches the candidate with companies that have shown a great interest in his/her profile. The result is that the whole recruitment process turns out to be a positive experience for both parties.

What kind of challenges do you have in your business right now?

"We have had a successful product launch in spring this year, as we continue growing organically across Sweden. We have a great team and keep up the hard work on product development. We are looking for an angel investor or a venture capitalist on a mission invest within the JobTech area in Sweden and help us grow. Scaling up and business development are currently the main areas in which we experience the biggest challenges to overcome issues and grow faster."

What type of data do you use from JobTech Development?

"Currently, we utilize APIs JobStream and JobAd Enrichments for our daily job and skill extraction. Occasionally, for geo-locations, occupations, and skills, we use the API Jobtech Taxonomy. One of JobTech Development’s recently released components is the API Connect Once. We are planning to implement it as well shortly."

In what way did it helpyou to improve/change your service?

"Most of the job platforms and startups that we have researched, analysed and looked at, end up often in a bottleneck of too few candidates or jobs (employers), which keeps the businesses from growing. JobTech`s open data platform, launched during our product development, allows us to fetch and collect jobs from all industries and all over Sweden into our matching system. It provided us with the fundament of our early-stage growth."

What are your vision and goal in the forthcoming 3-5 years?

"Our vision for the upcoming 3-5 years is to establish Employchain as a brand in Sweden, Germany (where we currently expand to), and other parts of Europe in cooperation with our partners from Sweden and throughout the EU. The accumulated data referring skills and occupations will be migrated into a maps application. It will allow us to show and update in real-time which skill or competence are currently offered and in demand in different regions throughout Sweden. We are on a mission to contribute to a data-driven labour market with a higher level of transparency, fairness, and equality for Sweden. Itis our vision for the forthcoming 3-5 years."