Agricultural job portal Sunjob has formalized 600 jobs since May 2018

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

The agricultural employment platform, Sunjob, launched its app only last summer and it already has 1,700 workers and 240 companies registered.

Manuel Lozano Morcillo is one of the three founding partners - together with Daniel Cabeza and Juan Luis Bravo - of Sunjob, an employment portal that connects supply and demand for work within the agricultural sector.

The idea behind this startup is to allow the supply and demand of employment in the agricultural sector to be married through an internet portal.

How and when is Sunjob born?

Born of a group of three lifelong friends. We all work in family businesses, different from each other, but we have business concerns and we wanted to develop a project, on our own, that was different from what we already have.

The idea arose when verifying the needs demanded by the agricultural sector.

I work in a consultancy, located in an environment where horticultural crops are predominant and their customers, most of them farmers came daily demanding agricultural labor. The fruit must be picked at the precise moment of maturity and the farmers did not find these workers when they needed them.

Daniel had a family farm and he talked to me daily: he could not find any staff. On Sunday afternoons and at night he kept calling desperately looking for people who wanted to work.

The effort and work to devise and then create a web platform of these characteristics has been, among other things, the great friendship that unites us and our work, related to a greater or lesser extent with this sector, which have allowed us to know the problem from within and consider what alternatives and solutions we could propose to this problem.

Where they are located?

Our headquarters are located on Paseo de Extremadura street, no. 44, in the town of Valdivia, Local Minority dependent on Villanueva de la Serena, a small town in the province of Badajoz in the heart of Las Vegas Altas del Guadiana, right in the Badajoz Plan.

Was it easy to start it?

Like any business project that is launched and that affects on the one hand the world of work and on the other the processes of personal data processing in a digital manner, it was not without difficulty, we would even say a lot of difficulty.

What problems did they encounter?

The main problem we had to face during the start-up of the business was, at first, the search for professionals who could develop the idea we had in mind and transform it into the tool that today is Sunjob.

Once this issue was solved, which was not simple - due to the lack of knowledge that the three partners have in the development of computer applications - the following problem arose when it came to transmitting to the programmer how we wanted the web to be and some of its functionalities The way to solve this was to dedicate a large part of our time to perform web running tests prior to its launch, many meetings with the programmer and sometimes modify things that were already finished, since it was not the idea that we had planned.

What was the reality of employment in the sector until the arrival of Sunjob?

The sector, specific for the agricultural world, was orphaned by any tool such as Sunjob. Only the traditional official channels worked, through the corresponding public employment offices, and even more the traditional "word of mouth" among professionals and companies in the sector that know "always" the workers willing to perform the different tasks agricultural when your time comes.

Job offers range from collecting fruit and vegetables, to pruning, thinning, sowing, etc.

What specific offers does the app collect?

All those related to agricultural activity, depending on the time of year in which you are, from the collection of fruits and vegetables, which according to what variety occurs at a given time of the year, to those related to the performance of other tasks such as pruning, thinning, sowing, etc.

Do you offer jobs throughout the year?

In practice yes. By not limiting ourselves to a specific geographical area, the work in the field is staggered throughout the year, depending on the geographical area or region in which we are located. If in summer the important thing is the fruit collection in Las Vegas del Guadiana, in spring we find the collection of the Cherry in the Valle del Jerte, in autumn there is harvest in many places in Spain and in winter the harvest of the olive in Andalusia . All this being said by way of example, because there are many more jobs in many places.

Your customers, they are...?

The profile of the clients is easy to define: companies that develop their activity in the rural and agricultural world, which need to use labor at certain times of the year for the development of this activity, and workers willing to perform those tasks.

It is not a specialized workforce, but in which your experience does have an important role when it comes to receiving an offer of employment.

Keys to your success?

Basically innovation and immediacy.

Innovation because there is no other tool so directly linked to the management of labor search for seasonal agricultural work.

Immediateness that derives from the absence of intermediaries for employers and workers, so that both the choice of the worker by the employer and its acceptance by the worker is made online without major delays.

What do you expect from 2019?

By 2019 our forecast is to continue growing, thanks to investors who are entering our project. Until now the project was practically a validation of our initial idea, and, thanks to new funds, we are already working to the next level of our technological solution, which will come to light in the next 2-3 months. This will allow to give a more complete service, trying to empower even more the agricultural sector in Spain through the qualification that allows the technology.

How do you see the future of your company?

We have high hopes for the future of our company. We have only been operating in the market a few months, since last May 2018, and there have already been more than 600 contacts that have been made among a hundred employers and workers through the application, having a 'matching 'of 30%.

Therefore, there have been more than 600 job opportunities that have been moved through our application.

We believe that the possibilities of growth of this tool are enormous, since it is developed in a sector that can not stop growing insofar as agriculture as a primary sector can never be lacking as an axis of economic activity, especially in the rural world.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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