Push the Jobbatical Vision Forward as Our New COO

I started my first company from a student project when I was sixteen and have been an entrepreneur ever since. It’s been exactly two decades (!!!) and in all this time, nothing has taught me more about leadership than my journey with Jobbatical.

That’s mainly because Jobbatical is where I finally learned how to empower people without micromanaging everything and everyone every step of the way. It took a lot of difficult conversations and borderline uncomfortable transparency. And it made me acknowledge my shortcomings as a leader in front of my team. I’m proud of how far we’ve come since then to build the team culture we have today.

This hard work is what gave me and my team the tools and the courage to make the easiest hard decision this summer: to turn the entire business around. (I went deeper into the reasoning behind it a while ago in my blog post about Why Jobbatical Evolved Into an Immigration Platform.) Yes, the numbers were clear as day. A small fragment of what we were doing—immigration and relocation—turned out to be our actual product-market fit. But letting go of the very core of your business is hard. After four years and almost half a million users? And having to say goodbye to a third of the team? It was an emotional gut-punch for all of us.

Still, as difficult it was, it was the right decision for Jobbatical. When you sit in meetings where your clients say you’re “doing God's work”, you know you’re a painkiller and not a vitamin. You know you’re solving a real problem. Today we’re fixing the immigration and relocation user experience. The potential for this to change lives is immense. And not just individual lives. In the era of the greatest talent shortage in human history, the patterns of workforce mobility are making and breaking economies. Fixing immigration for skilled talent will directly impact businesses and, ultimately, entire countries.

Since Jobbatical’s (very recent) evolution, the team has already built out almost a third of our product roadmap, saving hours upon hours of work for our clients, their international hires, and our own immigration experts. We’ve launched operations in two new countries—Spain and Germany—and are now adapting our platform to those markets.

We’ve moved faster than ever, but—pardon the cliché—we’re just getting started.

To keep the momentum going, we’re looking for a Chief Operating Officer to design and build out Jobbatical's expansion. We’re after someone with their own unique blend of fearlessness, operational leadership, attention to detail, and an analytical mind. Someone who understands why we should strive to build a world where immigration for skilled talent happens in seconds, not months. Someone whose eyes light up when we talk about thinking beyond borders to help the world work together.

Do you have the experience, skillset, and unrelenting passion to push the Jobbatical vision forward? Email me: karoli@jobbatical.com

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