Love Mondays: Online Platform Dedicated to Company Reviews in Brazil

Interview with Luciana Caletti, Founder and CEO of Love Mondays

What is your evaluation of the online recruitment sector here in Brazil?

The online recruitment market is growing very quickly in Brazil. We estimate that it is growing at 15% at the moment. There has been a lot of innovation recently in this market because for the first time in Brazilian history companies really need to invest in attracting candidates. The unemployment rate here has never been so low, right now it is at 4.3% and in many areas of the country there is full employment. Candidates who change jobs are usually hired from their current job and do not stay unemployed for a long time. The impact of this is that companies really have to invest in differentiating themselves as good places to work and in attracting talents from the market. As a consequence the online recruitment market is helping them to do this online which is a much more cost efficient way to recruit.

Can you tell us a bit more about Love Mondays?

We founded Love Mondays in June 2013 and we have seen very fast growth since we launched the platform. We started the company because nowadays qualified employees can choose where they want to work and therefore they need the right information to be able to make a well informed decision about their career. If a candidate is choosing between companies they might check the company´s websites and rankings or they might talk to someone that they know works for that company. However it can be hard to find detailed information from these sources about what it really is like to work for a company such as the work/life balance, career progression opportunities, work culture, etc., because this information can be very limited. That is why we created Love Mondays. Jobseekers don´t have to rely on the opinion of the one employee that they know but they can now read hundreds of reviews written by employees of the company all posted anonymously and therefore truthfully on our platform. We think this is a fantastic concept and a very useful tool for professionals.

We have had very fast growth already and we are very happy with the engagement the platform has with the public: people want to post reviews, people comment on those reviews and they are sharing this information with their friends which is what we expected from the platform.

Can you tell us a bit about the Aceleratech program?

We started Love Mondays in June last year and we started the acceleration program at Aceleratech in September. This acceleration program is part of Start-up Brazil which is the first initiative run by the government to incentivise technology start-ups. It is a four month long program in which you receive mentoring, access to investors and also you get people to look objectively at your business to give ideas and help you test your business in the real world. It has been a fantastic experience, we have just finished the 4 month program and now we feel that the company is ready to escalate.

Do you have any competition here in Brazil?

Love Mondays is the only platform in Brazil today that is fully dedicated to company reviews. We really focus on the user generated content written by employees about their opinions regarding their day to day work. We are the only platform here dedicated exclusively to this content today in Brazil.

What makes up the company philosophy?

We want Love Mondays to be a very useful tool for professionals for choosing the best company for them to be able to develop their careers. We want the website to help people find a job that will make them love Mondays. We know that career satisfaction is very important.We spend most of our lives at work and so we want people to be engaged in their workplace and working in a company that shares their values. Love Mondays is the platform where people can really find out what working for a particular company is like so that they can decide if it is a good place for them to develop their career.

What would you say are the main challenges that your company faces?

Our main challenge today is finding cost effective ways to grow our user and content base. People are engaging a lot on the site and we have a lot of content already but Love Mondays is still a very young business and we want to build a huge database of company information so that we can truly help professionals make informed decisions. Another key challenge is how can we scale this content so that it is not only relevant for people who work in huge organisations but also for people who work in small and medium sized companies.

Would you be interested in partnerships and investment?

We are very interested in developing partners with a wide range of companies including universities. We are told that students have two or three job offers by the time they graduate and so they need the tools to be able to understand what working for each company is really like. We are open to partnerships with universities, career centres, companies who are recruiting candidates of a certain profile and companies who invest in their employees and want to use this not only as a way to retain talent but also to communicate their work philosophy to attract talent.

What would you like to have achieved two years from now?

We want Love Mondays to be the first place where Brazilian professionals look for information when they are considering a career change. We are doing this by building our database of interesting content about different companies which is all user generated and therefore reliable.

What advice would you give to an international investor thinking of coming to invest in Brazil?

Brazil is a country where it is notoriously difficult to do business. The tax system is very complex and the taxes are very heavy so you need to invest a lot in accounting and administration. This can be a heavy burden for companies doing business in Brazil. However for that very reason there are a lot of opportunities in Brazil. Because it is so difficult it is a market that still offers a lot of opportunities for different business models that have been created abroad and are successful in other countries to be implemented here in Brazil because they don’t exist here yet.

I would say to foreign investors that if they are going to come to Brazil they should come prepared to be very patient with our tax system and bureaucracy because it can take a long time to get things done here but at the same time I would definitely say that they will still find a lot of new and untapped markets with huge growth opportunities. Furthermore with the increased purchasing power of the Brazilian population there is enormous opportunities for consumer products in several areas.

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