The Estonian recruitment agency is targeting the Dutch market

Tehnopol is part of the joint Northbound Scaleups (NBSCALE) project, which helps companies expand into new markets. The recruitment agency Workbite founded in Estonia has been to the Netherlands to meet potential partners in order to expand its activities.

Workbite is a job matching and hiring service for the supply of labour, and it also provides large-scale cleaning services. It works in Estonia with several well-known hotels and is taking an interest in expanding abroad to provide services elsewhere. One of the founders of Workbite, Kreete Juurak, said that the meetings in the Netherlands were mainly in small towns and rural areas and were held to gain some background on the local market.

The company had arranged five meetings in advance, of which only two actually happened, because one recruitment agency was closed for the summer holidays, a tulip farm had to cancel its meeting because it had received a large order, and the Ibis hotel chain completely forgot about the meeting. The enterprising startup was not discouraged though and simply went from door to door visiting other interesting businesses to discuss its services in more detail.

“It was very sad that three of the meetings we had arranged did not happen, but it was exciting to travel around and find a range of different companies and just walk in the door and introduce ourselves”, said Juurak.

The most successful meeting was at Damen Shipyards, which took its visitors on a tour of the production facilities, and it is planned that there will be further contact in the autumn at the management level. If this should lead to a lasting partnership, Workbite will be able to help provide work for several specialists and warehouse workers.

There were also entertaining adventures, as for example one vineyard had misunderstood from an earlier agreement that the Workbite representatives were themselves volunteering to work in the fields. “The whole enormous vineyard is worked by just one farmer, who owns it, and all the other staff are volunteers. They work with the local authority and a social worker comes with elderly dementia sufferers several times a week to work with the vines. They invited us as well to work the clay together with the elderly. That meeting did not go how we had initially planned, but we had a coffee and chatted with them, and it all worked out well”, recounted Juurak.

She said that gig work is tightly regulated and well respected in the Netherlands, unlike in Estonia. “Companies there are used to the idea and the nature of temporary labour, and they plan for the cost of it in advance in their budgets”, she said, adding that the intermediation fees can be up to 17 times what they are in Estonia.

The biggest competitor in Holland is the global job matching and hiring platform Indeed, which advertises job offers for temporary work and works with large companies like Toyota and Ikea. They generally do not deal with smaller clients though. There are also various other hiring agencies working in Holland, but Juurak said they did not see any competitors that were operating a platform like Workbite.

The biggest challenge in Holland would be to create a new community. “We will of course give a large number of our Estonian users the chance to work abroad for a good wage, but we will also need to employ locals and other foreigners who have moved to Holland”, explained Juurak.

Workbite has set up a subsidiary Workbite Cleaning to handle the large-scale cleaning projects, and it plans in future to prioritise their cleaning service even more. “We can see a need in this market for improvement in the quality of service, in staff retention, and in wage levels”, noted Juurak.

Northbound Scaleups (NBSCALE) is a joint project run by Tehnopol, the Turku Science Park in Finland and Movexum in Sweden to help companies expand into new markets.