CV-Online gets 3 million euros in funding

  • 2001-02-08
  • Aleksei Gunter
TALLINN - The Estonia-based recruitment agency CV-Online received a 3 million euro ($2.82 million) investment on Feb. 1 from 3TS Venture Partners, a Czech Republic-based financial adviser of the venture capital fund Technologieholding Central and Eastern European Funds and appointed a new CEO, Norrie Sinclair.

CV-Online operates in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Hungary, Finland and is presently the largest online recruitment agency in the region and was founded in Estonia in 1996. The company provides about 100 jobs. It's free for job seekers, with the companies hiring footing the costs.

Michael White, head of 3TS Venture Partners, said CV-Online is one of the few companies that managed to successfully cross borders, though many European dot-coms claim that as their objective.

3TS was accompanied by venture capital investors Edventure Holdings Inc. from the United States and LHV Ventures of Estonia as partial investors.

With the help of Sinclair, which has been in the recruitment field for over a decade in Great Britain and Europe, and headed the recruitment agency Nicholson International's division for Central Europe and Turkey, CV-Online hopes to further expand west, said Juri Kaljundi, the company's board chairman and co-founder.

Esther Dyson, chairman of Edventure Holdings, commented on the development of the European recruitment market.

"We see a huge opportunity in Central and Eastern Europe not just for a more efficient labor market but also for tools and services to increase employee skills and human resources productivity," said Dyson.

CV-Online is not the only company of its kind in Estonia. Compiling CVs is not the company's only goal, but it also matches employers and employees.

The quality of service is what matters, according to Meelis Zuyev, project manager at Mega CV, the online recruitment agency of the Estonian Internet portal Mega.

Although CV-Online claims its database includes over 22,000 CVs in Estonia only, or about six times more than Mega CV, which has been operating since last November, both services offered approximately the same number of job opportunities as of Feb. 5 Ð 126 and 104 respectively.