As we are leaving the first month of 2023 behind us, we face a year that comes with an unprecedented level of uncertainty for businesses. 2022 was a tough year, with war and inflation leading to decreased growth expectations for companies and a crunch of tech stocks, and we believe that this year, the challenges will continue. Together with my Co-Founder Felipe Navío Garcia, I’d like to talk openly about the journey our company went on last year, how we solved challenges as a team, and what we believe 2023 has in store for us.
Bringing people into work and helping businesses thrive: A purpose that never felt more vital than now
When we founded Job&Talent 14 years ago, we wanted to contribute to solving a huge challenge: the rising unemployment rate among young people in Spain. Job&Talent was born during a crisis with the goal of helping people and businesses through these tough times. It’s a purpose that has never felt more vital than now. In all of our operating countries, the scarcity of essential workers is a fact. On average, one third of the temporary workforce demand of companies remains unfilled, which slows down businesses and supply chains alike. Job&Talent can provide the dearly needed flexible workforce alongside reliability, simplicity and transparency. In 2022, we kept our fulfillment rate at 90% which is way above industry benchmark, and simultaneously improved the satisfaction scores of our 2,500 clients globally to an NPS (net promoter score) of around 60.
Beyond supporting businesses during these unprecedented times, we’re particularly proud of the impact we have on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people: In 2022, we were able to bring more than 340,000 people into work. This number showcases the social and economic impact we have as a company, in line with the United Nations’ sustainable development goal of decent work and economic growth. By providing back-to-back job opportunities, we ensure a solid stream of income for workers and contribute millions of Euros to the economy through taxes and social-security payments.
What the industry-wide mantra of sustainable growth meant for Job&Talent
Job&Talent’s journey over the last few years has been exceptional: We grew from €350m revenue in 2020 to €1.9bn in 2022, and we have shown operating EBITDA profitability alongside that growth for many years. We expected this growth to continue over the next few years, and scaled our investments in our team, product and tech, marketing, and acquisitions accordingly. This was the reason why we struggled with maintaining our profitability in H1 of last year, and we know that many high-growth companies found themselves in a similar situation. Therefore, in anticipation of a decline of global macroeconomic growth, together with the management team we took some measures since the end of H1 to reduce hires, costs and expansion, moving into a much more prudent scenario. These efforts paid off, as we were able to navigate the volatile market without any mass layoffs and even closing the year with a positive operating EBITDA run rate, achieving 90% revenue growth to €1.9 billion.
What stands out is the development of our youngest market, the US. After launching operations in July 2021, the US has already become our third largest market in terms of revenue after the UK and Spain, with top performing YoY growth, over 350 clients, and operations in more than 20 states.
Putting our product and people at the core of everything we do
One of the key challenges for us last year was ensuring that our product could keep up with the strong growth of our business. That’s why, in the last 12 months, we worked extremely hard on strengthening our tech and product capabilities, growing the teams threefold. With our incredibly talented crew, we are improving our platform with new functionalities, aiming to provide a 10x experience for our workers and clients in all of our countries.
New features on our platform will help companies better manage their workforce with improved onboarding of workers, planning, shift management, and clocking. This will save unnecessary costs and engage the workforce even more. We also have great new product features in the pipeline for our workers, including a revamped job search, company ratings, improved job cards with videos, improved onboarding, clocking, daily payments, and more. We believe that this will significantly enhance the worker experience, and will further increase their satisfaction levels (NPS already at c. 60). We have already seen the positive impact of some of those functionalities, and we can’t wait to see other new features come to life, and bring them to all our clients and workers globally as we will continue to invest into our tech and product teams in 2023.
Of course, technology means nothing without the people behind it. Last year, we grew our team to around 3,000 employees. Having started in Spain over a decade ago, we now truly are an international company. We pride ourselves on having built a strong culture and operating principles that unite our teams globally. Some of our greatest efforts have gone into fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in order to create a caring community and a sense of belonging. We have set ourselves ambitious goals and are delighted to share some of the results today: We are close to achieving 100% of our equal pay targets in all departments; the promotion velocity is equal across genders, with women being promoted slightly faster than men; we hired double as many women in leadership roles in 2022 than we did in 2021; and 73% of our leadership hires last year were made outside of Spain.
A promising starting position for 2023
Last year, we proved to be adaptable and efficient, and put ourselves in an excellent starting position for 2023. Together with our positive EBITDA trajectory, this allows us to continue our journey without the need of raising new funds, which we will only do should we decide to make strategic key investments or to improve our capital structure.
For Job&Talent, this year will be all about value creation: We will deliver a stellar product and service to generate value for our workers and clients. We will also continue on our path of improving profitability while we keep growing faster than our peers. And, most importantly, our scale will put us in a position to support people and businesses alike throughout the challenges and opportunities of the year ahead.
- Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navío Garcia, Founders and CEOs of Job&Talent
