‘Indonesia’s LinkedIn’ raises money from MNC Group

KerjaDulu co-founders Chris Liu (left) and Bruce Sung.

KerjaDulu is an Indonesian social recruitment portal for job seekers and employers, comparable to LinkedIn. Today it announced a strategic investment from local media conglomerate MNC Group.

The startup said its post-investment valuation is at US$5 million, but did not disclose other terms of the deal.

Launched in January 2014, KerjaDulu now consists only of about ten people, CEO and co-founder Chris Liu says. Most of them are developers in Taiwan. That’s because Taiwan is where Chris built his professional network before returning to Indonesia. He worked there for 20 years and started his first venture – an out-of-home advertising company – which he exited before founding KerjaDulu.

Some of the site’s features make it resemble LinkedIn. People set up a profile page and connect with professional contacts. But unlike LinkedIn, which prioritizes a person’s CV, member pages on KerjaDulu focus on their online activities.

This is what Line’s profile and activities page looks like on KerjaDulu.

Members can follow company profiles and get an alert when there are new job openings. Chris says the aim is to combine the benefits of a job portal with that of a social network.

The site now has “somewhere in between 500,000 and 1,000,000 registered users,” according to Chris. It does not track monthly active users because job search is not an activity that recurs on a monthly basis.

“70 percent of our users have a college degree,” Chris adds, “we have 65 percent returning visitors and some 11,000 active job listings.”

Some of the companies working with KerjaDulu to recruit in Indonesia include SinarMas, messenger app Line, and the University of Indonesia.

So far, Chris says, 388 companies have completed the site’s sign-up procedure, which is a bit time consuming because KerjaDulu puts them through a verification process. Some 3,000 companies have registered, but still require approval.

KerjaDulu is free to use for companies and job seekers, explains Chris. Monetization will come at a later point, and the team is still discussing the possibilities.

Following the investment, MNC plans to intensify its own use of the portal for recruitment purposes and use its media channels to help market KerjaDulu.