Very often when I travel, and meet people that have never been to Bulgaria or Southeastern Europe, I get asked “what’s it like there”. I always have a few short narratives for those occasions, depending on the setting and the people I’m talking to. Sometimes it’s about our organic food, yogurt, and the 300+ annual days of sun, combined with beaches in summer and ski slopes in winter. Sometimes, when the situation is more business-oriented, I talk about the excitement of living and working in a country where the economy and society are going through a foundational growth period, much like the Western countries had in the 1950s-1970s. And sometimes, if I feel like leaving a soundbite that for sure won’t be forgotten, I quote the two incredible statistics, that sound like an impossible contradiction. The first is that according to Eurostat, Bulgaria is in the top three fastest growing economies in the EU (and for some recent years, it’s number one). The second is that according to The Economist, Bulgaria is the fastest depopulating country in the world. Now, how is that combination even possible?
It’s not just a major problem, and even a paradox, but actually the most defining factor of Bulgaria’s economy. Between the national censuses held in 2011 and 2021, Bulgaria lost close to 700,000 people, largely to net emigration and low birth rates. From a peak population of 10.5 million in 1989, the 2021 figure stands at 6.5 million. There are many sociological and economical theories that can be expanded around these numbers, whether it’s a terrible thing, or maybe not so terrible, but the fact is that the scarcity of human resources is the single biggest business risk and challenge in the country.
No one knows this better than HR professionals. One of them is Ivaylo Pirovski, who was responsible for large recruitment projects for major manufacturing and retail operations in Bulgaria in the last decade. As Ivaylo says today, tens of thousands of jobs got filled under his supervision, and when Covid came, within a stretch of two years, a big part of these jobs had to be first vacated, and then re-hired as the economy bounced back in 2021-2022.
That rollercoaster ride left Ivaylo with a profound feeling that something is very broken in the recruitment process for unskilled and vocational workers. “When you have to hire a couple of hundred people within several months in Bulgaria, that’s never easy”, says Ivaylo as we talk about the pre-conditions that led him to leave his job and start a recruitment technology company. “But when you’re dealing with unskilled and low-digital-literacy candidates, it’s near-impossible.”
As Ivaylo says, the main problem is the lack of tools for collecting candidate CVs and communicating with them. “The major job boards are targeted at office workers, and are of very little use for jobs in manufacturing, logistics, delivery, construction, or cleaning. Even if you manage to reach out with your job offer, interviewing and closing the candidates is a big communicational nightmare.” According to Ivaylo, the main platform for such recruitment work is still Facebook, which was neither designed for that, nor is efficient for recruiters to use. “You literally spend your days staring at 50 open tabs of conversations and ad management pages, and it sucks all the time and energy out of you, for very meager results”, he adds.
One day Ivaylo attended an event where he met chatbot developers Rosen Zhivkov and Zhivko Zhivkov, to whom he shared his grievances, and the three started ideating about ways to solve the recruitment challenges with the use of a chat interface. Soon after, the group was joined by leading Bulgarian IT entrepreneur Ivaylo Slavov, who got inspired by the tech and business challenge of building a chat-based recruitment solution, and VibeJobs was born as a company.
As Ivaylo concedes today, the name was a bit cheeky to start with, because the Viber messenger is by far the biggest communication platform in Bulgaria and the region, and while the team knew that it should be the launch platform of their tool, they had no idea if the messaging giant, owned by Rakuten, would even be interested in enabling it, let alone partnering.
“And here’s where we got really lucky”, says Ivaylo. “Not only does Viber have a big product and development office in Sofia, but its VP of global marketing and growth, Atanas Raykov, is also based out of Sofia, and is a veteran startup mentor and enthusiast. When we pitched the idea to Atanas, he immediately saw the value in VibeJobs, and offered us a full partnership for the tool on the Viber platform”.
According to Ivaylo, Viber’s main KPI for partnership opportunities is to increase the time spent in the app, and while most other chatbot tools try to get money from users by selling products or services, VibeJobs is the one that can actually make users money. “It was a no-brainer for them, and we’re really grateful that they saw that right away”.
Since VibeJobs launched last month, in April 2024, it has amassed over 18,000 users in just a little over three weeks, and Ivaylo and the team have signed deals with several of the biggest employers in retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. Fully in line with their partner Viber’s global footprint, the VibeJobs team has its eyes set on the next markets. “We’ll start with Serbia, where the situation is very similar to Bulgaria, and then we’ll probably go after Greece and the other large South European and CEE markets that have attractive dynamics”, says Ivaylo. “The whole point of VibeJobs is to lower the bar for candidates, and to ease the friction between recruiters and job applicants, and we’re very excited about the traction we’ve achieved in so little time so far, and the opportunities that await us”, he concludes.