Digital products and targeted campaigns driving 32 per cent revenue growth at Ofir

Published Friday 26 August, 2022

The Danish labour force is working at full throttle these days. Employment is at a historic high and there is fierce competition to attract the best candidates for jobs in both the private and the public sectors. That has produced a lot of traffic at Ofir’s job site, one of Denmark’s largest job portals, which attracts some 400,000 visitors every month. Revenue for the first half of the year amounted to DKK 22.1 million, a 32 per cent increase over the first half of 2021 which followed an 84 per cent increase over H1 2020.

“Business is good at Ofir right now. Our basic growth driver is our customers experiencing that Ofir provides the right products and the right campaigns for their candidate searches. ‘Right’ in the sense that they are able to reach more qualified candidates, to target their searches to the right recipients and to fill a recruitment assignment by way of a marketing mix operating on several channels and, not least, in the social media. And we’ve enjoyed fair tailwinds in the market recently,” says Ofir’s CEO Karsten Vikke.

CEO Karsten Vikke, Ofir.

 

More and better candidates at a low price
“Our campaigns and our products hit a sweet spot between active and passive job seekers and enable us to reach a broader group of candidates. We meet them where they are on social media and combine that with traditional, efficient job ads on portals. At the same time, we tap directly into our clients’ digital preparedness and their wish to communicate their job vacancies in a better and more price-efficient way than through general advertising. These are exciting times,” says Vikke.

Advertising for both active and passive job seekers is a very powerful combination. The vast majority of people in the labour market have profiles on social media regardless of their age and educational or social backgrounds, and Ofir has cracked the code on how to reach relevant candidates for a given position in a comprehensive advertising product, so Ofir’s clients in corporate HR departments need not set up agreements with multiple providers. It is efficient, easy and comes at a fair price.

“Our job is to get our clients the best qualified employees for their vacant positions. We have a unique data model that enables us to reach the target group with great precision in our campaigns, and our specialists make sure they design good and efficient ads every time,” says Vikke.

Also relevant in times of economic decline
While currently experiencing fair growth in the private-sector job market, Ofir also holds a strong position in the public sector, serving two thirds of Denmark’s local authorities in their recruitment efforts.

Combining recruitment marketing with a popular job portal is equally relevant in times of boom and in times of bust. Social media are here to stay, and it is fair to say that targeted campaigns at fair prices that expand the field of qualified candidates will not go out of fashion any time soon, comments Karsten Vikke, who also spends a lot of his time preparing for Ofir’s continued growth journey.

“We’ve gone from being a small start-up to a scale-up with all the inherent challenges we’ve had to overcome in order to manage our growth. The answers to challenges are almost always to automate and digitise, so you have everything running without hampering future growth,” he explains.

Ofir has made giant leaps in renewing its digital infrastructure and developing a new data platform, including a data warehouse that has already been launched. Despite the multi-year growth journey, Vikke continues to see great potential in Ofir’s products.

“Very often, we are met with habitual thinking and a conservative approach by many employers, who apply the same processes, media and even the same wordings with only minimal differences from one job ad to the next. And they do it over and over again,” says Vikke, and he continues: “At Ofir, we need to become even better at reaching HR departments in both private and public-sector organisations and make them aware how they can benefit from our services. To do that, we are constantly working on content marketing, we offer advice on recruitment and have a new podcast universe in the pipeline, we publish relevant articles and run online seminars.