This Oxford-educated woman used AI to create a multi-million pound London startup

Co-founded Jump.Work in London in 2016 to find a solution to hiring problem

Marja Verbon’s fascination with the labour market began during her masters at the Oxford University. She soon concluded that modern labour market dynamics were fundamentally broken, and that little had been done to address the problem of career inequality.

Why do some of us get jobs easily whilst others struggle? How could we make this system fairer? This problem followed Verbon for a long time in her corporate career at different MNCs. Mid-2016, she finally found the courage to leave her traditional career path and start Jump.Work in London with her partner Andrea Consonni (now CEO) to find a solution to this problem.

Unlike other recruitment agencies, which focused on sifting unsuitable people out, Verbon’s founded Jump.Work to help people find jobs that really fit them, and for businesses to find people that they might not otherwise have considered. Jump.Work uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to better match candidates to businesses based on their true talents, not just their CV. It uses ‘blind recruiting’ techniques such as personality, cultural fit and skill assessments to help show off the true potential of candidates and remove inherent bias in the recruitment bias such as the impact of name, gender on our decisions.

This ideology helped Verbon quickly raise £500k from leading VC angels, entrepreneurs and industry experts to get Jump.Work off the ground.

In a matter of time, Jump.Work has been able to acquire more than 50 leading law firms in the UK, recruit more than 100,000 professionals onto the platform and have processed over five million worth of jobs. All this with a team of just eight people!

It’s an approach that seems to be working. Unlike recruitment agencies, hiring teams using the Jump.Work platform consistently close 2 out of every 3 jobs, and every month for the last six months, the company has doubled its revenue.

Talking about her future plans, the 27-year-old wants to make Jump.Work the number one hiring platform in the UK. It doesn’t stop there. Verbon also wants to expand into consulting, accounting and financial services where the Jump.Work model would work equally well. Verbon also hopes to expand into the US market eventually.