Michael von Hirschfeld

Recruitment consulting has two parts. The first is consulting: which role does the company need, and how can it best meet its challenges? This part looks different in every assignment.

The second part is placement: bringing people on the labour market together with what the company needs. I have professionalised this part and use it to support companies. Still, I am not as good at it as a transparent market would be. That is what JobID is for, with transparency across the whole labour market and an automatic match of who fits which job. I want to give that to companies and job seekers.

In 2011, the idea of a new search technology for the job market received a funding commitment from the Innovationsstiftung Hamburg. The first attempt showed what was missing: product management and research. To this day, standard software cannot solve the problem.

From 2019, both parts came together in a funded research project. It produced the data and system architecture and a first prototype. In the years after Covid, no follow-up funding could be found for the next stage, and the project ended.

Over the same period, recruitment consulting changed: less placement, more consulting. At HireWorks we developed our own requirements management for this, the HIHB method (High-Impact Hiring Blueprint). It describes the phase before the search, pre-recruiting, and prepares recruiting so that mis-hires are avoided and high potentials are recognised, found and hired. The requirements management is now coming to market as an application of its own.

In 2019, reading job ads and CVs by machine was laborious and expensive. Today, language models handle that part. The real work remains the shared standard for tasks and skills, the context knowledge that every ad and every job search profile is matched against. Why a language model cannot do this alone is explained on the vision page.

The first step is a job board for HR roles, planned from the second quarter of 2027. It will show whether the matches beat a search by title. JobID is operated by HireWorks GmbH.