Nexi.Me: Finding Top Talent in a (Social) Network Near You

Nexi.Me is a new Romanian startup that wants to make it easier for companies to reach top talent! Nexi.Me started its life about a year ago when the founders were working in a Romanian job search engine, Balaur. Because of their work there, cofounders Cristian Andreica and Ciprian Mardare already had a good understanding of the online recruiting space and their time at Balaur let them discover what tools and even more importantly – answered 2 key questions: what problems did the best tools solve and how much were companies ready to pay for them.

Old Methods and New Nexi.Me Potential

Common wisdom says that the best employees are those that you discover through your network: be it your own or that of your current employees, friends and partners. Of all the places and sources that could bring in new hires, referrals brought the best candidates and as Cristian notes for .Me, even many of their own friends found a job by being referred to a company. To make sure referrals were the right choice, the Nexi.Me teams spent some time with their potential customers:

We spent a few weeks to meet with HR managers in Romania and we found that over 25% of the employees are hired through referrals.

While recruiting may be the strongest source, it’s still stuck in the old ways of emails and phone calls. Christian notes that afterwords most candidates are processed into an Excel file which proves quite a bother both both sides. Christian thinks that the time a potential employee spends on the various administrative work could be used more wisely:

An employee has to go through a lot of effort to make a referral (phone calls, emails to HR, obtaining and sending CVs, feedback). Keep in mind, this is not their primary job.

What some may see as “business as usual”, the Nexi.Me team saw as an opportunity – a chance to help employees in the referral process and even more important for a startup that wants to make money: help companies hire top talent.

The business model is based on paid job postings. Each job costs 99 Euros that makes it available to other users of Nexi.me for a period of 30 days. The longer you need to fulfill the position, the more credits you pay. But if the job takes just 30 days to fulfill, why pay for more than you need.

Even More Startup Experience for the Romanian Scene

I actually met Cristian for the first time while attending Mini Seedcamp Zagreb several years ago. Nexi.me is a new startup and Cristian has a lot more experience, thanks in a lot of way to the How to Web 2011 conference that takes place in his native Bucharest each year, organized by Bogdan Iordache and his team.

They pitched to an international audience and were selected as the 10 finalists of the Startup Competition. At How to Web, they met Jim Digby, the cofounder of Rockstar Accelerator and the rest, as Cristian notes on the Nexi.me blog, is history:

Having its headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Rockstart was one of the most promising accelerators in Europe, with lots of experienced mentors, € 15000 investment and a trip to the Silicon Valley. We found it very attractive and started the application process. The website had extensive information about the program and the founders were very professional, fact that gave us confidence.

On the 22nd of March, we received the great news. We were accepted into the program. We were prepared to have a great experience, make tons of contacts and iterate the product to reach product-market fit.

That’s why Cristian is so glad that How to Web 2012 was even bigger. His team met a lot of entrepreneurs and investors from abroad and saw some great talks – from people like Phil Libin (CEO Evernote) and David Bizer (HackFwd) – he notes.

Cristian believes that the Romanian can improve by creating global products, much like the famous Romanian startup UberVu has already done and as Nexi.me wants to do:

I personally believe Romania can improve a lot by creating more products with a global market. The entire .RO market is pretty small, of about € 260M. I still see a lot of entrepreneurs think small and decide to launch local products. Investors are used to invest in the local markets that they understand and where they have the biggest chance to generate quick revenue. Creating global value should be the primary focus.

Interestingly, the Nexi.me team believes that the biggest issue for the HR (human resources) industry is creating products that engage the employees. In their view, HR products like Nexi.me are no longer just a big set of features, with no focus on retention. This is exactly why they went with a .Me domain name, as Christian summarizes:

We believe that SaaS products can be personal as well. Nexi.me is easy to remember and brings you closer to the product.