Building the first hiring marketplace inside a 100M-user social network

VK, formerly Mail.ru Group, is Russia's equivalent of Meta, running the two biggest social networks in the region: VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Worki, the classifieds and HR-tech product I co-founded, was acquired by VK and rebranded as VK Jobs. I joined as Head of Product Design to integrate hiring tools into the platform where the audience already lived.

At the time, no HR service in Russia allowed employers to post jobs directly into social communities. We built one inside VKontakte.

The idea was to connect employers, job seekers, community owners, and the platform in one service. Employers could post jobs, pay for them, and receive applications without having to negotiate with community admins in private messages. The system also handled proper invoices and payments.

There was another part to it. When someone applied for a job inside a community, we guided them through creating a CV. That CV went into our database, where other recruiters could find and contact the candidate.

So every application could bring another candidate into the database, and the growing database made the service more useful to recruiters. Over time, this helped us grow both the CV database and daily traffic.