“My Executive MBA has been the starting point of my entrepreneurial journey” – Samira Scheerer on a start-up story

This is the story of Samira Scheerer, co-founder and Executive MBA in Innovation & Business Creation alumna, who aims to revolutionize the traditional job search for young talents with her online job-matching platform: Jobreel.

Starting a career can be an extremely challenging and overwhelming undertaking for young talents. Established job platforms often prioritize job titles as the central criterion for job searches. However, the problem with this approach is that it assumes job seekers already know what they are looking for, which is often not the case. In reality, many job seekers lack a clear overview of potential roles and may not have a firm preference for a particular job. Moreover, these platforms fail to consider the specific experiences of students and graduates, whether gained from university classes or extracurricular activities. As a result, relevant skills and qualifications that don’t neatly align with traditional job titles may be overlooked. Furthermore, purely text-based job postings are usually overwhelming on one hand and too vague on the other hand, particularly concerning the field of activity, working environment, and company culture. For fresh bachelor’s and master’s graduates, this status quo is unsuitable and one that literally cries out for an innovative solution.

The journey to shaping opportunities

Previous to the start of her Executive MBA journey in 2020, Samira Scheerer, was aware of the opportunity to improve the way young talents start their career as she herself was confronted with similar challenges as a young graduate. During her career as a consultant at renowned management consultancies, she worked for clients in the labor market, where she had often witnessed the lack of career orientation for academic talents.

This opportunity was to gain new momentum during her Executive MBA journey, more specifically, in the last module – the so-called Impact Project. During this project module, students identify and validate a business idea in line with their purpose and own vision and design all aspects of the business model. Together with her fellow students, Samira dedicated herself to the idea of a job simulation platform. The goal: to make professions more tangible for young talents. The starting signal for a success story.

Jobreel – landing a dream job with the help of AI

“During my studies, my desire to build up my own business was always reinforced,” says Samira, looking back. No sooner said than done. During the last semester of her Executive MBA, she quit her job in consulting and took part in the accelerator program of the day zero investor Antler in Berlin. There she met her co-founder Tobias Grabmeier, also a TUM alumnus, who brings extensive experience in Product, Development and Design. Both were united by the desire to support young talents with their first steps in starting their career. Together, they developed the vision of building an AI-powered career companion to guide young talent into the world of work, starting with the quiz-based job-matching – and finally founded the candidate-first platform Jobreel in February 2023.

What distinguishes Jobreel from traditional job boards is the intuitive and personalized frontend and the use of artificial intelligence in the backend. Central elements of the platform are a unique matching algorithm and a playful quiz that creates a profile of users based on skills, preferences, and personality traits. In addition to the usual search criteria, such as job title and location, criteria such as study progress, skills, preferred industries and activities, company size or culture, and personality traits are also recorded. Based on this data, AI matches the most suitable jobs with potential employers, thus enabling a much faster search. It also increases the possibility of discovering suitable jobs that would otherwise have fallen through the search grid due to their titles.

Another benefit: Jobreel offers improved and enriched job ads that provide inspiration and guidance, in addition to all essential information, in the form of additional media content – such as reviews, podcasts, articles, videos, and images. Further updates are planned with AI applications in the form of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLM), for example, to summarize and explain job descriptions or to take even more account of resumes in the job matching process.

The Executive MBA as a pathfinder for innovation

For Samira, one thing is certain: the Executive MBA had a decisive influence on the founding of Jobreel. “It is simply formative to deal intensively with innovation and entrepreneurship for two years. In the various modules we learned everything – from idea validation to market launch to financing, scaling, and internationalization. This prepared me very well. A valuable setting. Especially if you plan to leave your comfort zone,” she states.

“The networking opportunities during and after the Executive MBA have been the greatest asset for me.” Samira shares, “In addition, I received so much inspiration from the many points of contact with entrepreneurs and the entire TUM ecosystem. A defining moment here was the international module at UC Berkeley and visiting startups in the Bay Area. Here I felt confirmed that I had made the right decision to quit my job for building my own company.” That courage has paid off. And if the success story continues, the many young talents on the labor market will also benefit from Samira’s entrepreneurial spirit.

Interested?

Like Samira Scheerer, shape opportunities in a safe space but vibrant ecosystem surrounded by visionaries, innovators and out-of-the-box thinkers. Learn more about our Executive MBA in Innovation & Business Creation here.