Dedicated to delivering excellence
Everyone has a story. Here is our story.
The Begining
The IJC journey began in 2006, when the company was founded in Cluj-Napoca. We were learning, by trial and error, about recruiting and how to do it. There was no one around to teach us.
What we did know since then, though, was that respect and honesty go a long way.
It was at that point, in 2006, when for the first time ever a recruiter managed to place a Software Developer in Cluj-Napoca.
That recruiter was an IJC recruiter. Our story was just beginning.
Rising and then falling hard
Come 2007 we started growing and expanding our horizons. We went about teaching others what recruiting was all about.
Things were beginning to look good as we were on our way to build a stable portfolio of clients. We started to be be recognized as the first and only company specialized in IT recruiting in Cluj-Napoca. Actually, as far as we knew, we were the first in the whole of Romania. At the time, it was a big deal for us.
Then the 2008-2009 recession hit. As everyone else, we were hit too and it was hard. The business seemed to crumble and it actually almost did. We had a really bad fall. Our story could have ended then. But we survived.Â
Revival and expansion
In 2009 we first published our Rules of Engagement.
In the next couple of years after 2009 we managed to slowly rebuild our portfolio of clients.
Some of them were the initial ones (those that had survived themselves) but many were newcomers to the local IT scene. Things started to somewhat pick up in 2011.
It took some time, but by 2012 we had gathered enough momentum to spread our wings outside our home city of Cluj-Napoca. We started exploring recruiting all over Romania.
Learning and building
Things were getting interesting. In 2013 our manager, Ovidiu Pavel, became the first LinkedIn Certified Recruiter in Romania and one of the first 300 in the world.Â
We were starting to recruit in new places. We had to learn how to adapt to new people, new local specifics. By 2014 we were covering all of Romania and had also closed our first few top management positions. We had, officially, added Executive Search / Head Hunting to our portfolio.
The next thing on our list was starting international recruiting in Europe.
We learned a lot and continued to develop our internal tool, a recruiting management system, which was helping us be more efficient. Soon, it would become a special project of ours.
Doing what we knew best and building something new
In 2015 we continued to successfully do IT Recruiting all over Romania as well as Executive Search projects. However, we postponed going international in favor of another project.
We invested a lot of time and resources in turning our internal tool into a product. At that time it was more advanced than any other ATS or similar tool on the market. It was, after all, designed by recruiters for recruiters. Its purpose was to make everything much more efficient.
We named it BitJobs and we launched at the end of 2015.
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Continuing recruiting, discontinuing BitJobs
For a couple of years, 2016 through 2017, we worked to maintain focus on two fronts. The recruiting was business as usual, we continued to recruit in Romania and expand our network of talent as well as our client base.
But BitJobs wasn’t the success story we had envisioned. Although we put a lot of effort into making it work it just wasn’t enough and it didn’t get the much needed traction. In hindsight, the mistakes we made are obvious. Back then they weren’t. The classic story of every failed startup. So at the end of 2017 we discontinued BitJobs.
We did, however, continue to use the product internally. It continued to help us a lot and only made us wonder “what if?”.
Capitalizing and diversifying
We decided to capitalize on our extensive experience in recruiting. Thus, for the next years we focused on recruiting and executive search.
In 2018 we assisted our first client with opening their branch in Cluj-Napoca. We decided to add this service to our portfolio. Since then we have supported multiple clients with setting up a business in Romania.Â
Our evolution continued in 2019 as well, as we introduced a couple of more services, all centered around IT recruiting.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the new status quo
Come 2020, out of the blue, our lives were different. A strange virus changed everything we knew about everyday life.
The relationship people have with their job changed. Employers changed. Recruiting changed. Yet again, we adapted and quickly learned the new status quo.
The pandemic was declared over in May 2023. By that time we were all operating remote and more agile than ever.
Today, every day, we are recruiters
We now recruit internationally. We are focused on the most exciting areas of IT. Cybersecurity, SRE & DevOps, Artificial Intelligence & ML, Data Science,
Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), to name just a few.
We’re currently offering a wide range of services, we even help startups with scaling. But we continue to be, first and foremost, recruiters.
We started this journey 18 years ago. Since then we have seen a lot and have been through a lot. But our story continues.
We still seek to enjoy every conversation and learn new things from every new candidate or client we meet. It’s the best perk our job has to offer. A job which we genuinely love!
Today we function as an international team of senior IT recruiters. We are distributed over 3 time zones in Europe. Our methods employ a lot of the well known agile principles. Discretion and direct contact are part of our way of operating. Each of us focuses on particular clients and areas of the industry. Our collective experience and extended network of talent make us highly efficient.Â
We're a company founded on hard work, integrity and trust. Mutual respect and honesty are the base of all the relationships we create.
Passionate
Our passion and enthusiasm about our jobs are still there. We genuinely love what we do and that helps us to provide a good experience.
Respectful
The world and life in general can be complicated. To counterbalance, we are polite and kind to one another, especially when it gets tougher..
Accountable
We are mature, experienced and adaptable consultants. Accountability and ownership empower us to do our job well.
Together
We work together, as a team. We trust each other and in each other's expertise to deliver the best results to our clients.
