Job Search Made Easy: Grizzly.jobs Develops AI-Based Web Scraping Technology

Founding team of Grizzly.jobs: Markus Herzberger, Lukas Rachek, Oliver Lippmann, Christoph Ostertag, Kirills Mehany

Vienna (A) A working world where people believe in themselves and follow their passion: this is the vision of Grizzly.jobs, a Viennese startup founded in September 2024. This is made possible by Bärnhard, an AI-powered job agent in chat format.

Bärnhard collects users' preferences via chat and searches for jobs from around 1,500 companies daily. It provides targeted job suggestions with brief explanations of why these jobs are a good fit.

“Using modern AI techniques such as large language models (LLMs) makes it possible to identify deeper connections between job descriptions and user preferences,” explains co-founder and CTO Oliver Lippmann. “LLMs go beyond traditional search filters, which are often keyword-based and miss relevant positions.”

The founders assessed the need through manual business recommendations.
The founders started with simple phone conversations, asking job seekers about their career aspirations. They were amazed at how detailed their interests and past projects were. “To see how long job seekers would spend writing to the AI agent, we tested a version that asked endless questions,” Markus Herzberger recalls with a smile. “After 20 minutes, some of my friends found it less funny—but it helped us better understand user behavior.”

Initially, the focus was on IT and data science, but it was clear from the start that the job agent would cover all areas. After the first interviews, the founders manually generated hundreds of job recommendations with short comments. The next step was a simple conversation that also provided manually-powered recommendations. The comments: “If the technology behind it works, this will be the best way to find jobs.”

FFG funding enables development of AI-based web scraping technology
Thanks to support from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Grizzly.jobs has been developing an AI-based web scraping technology since March 2024 that can be used to capture jobs directly from companies’ career pages. Until now, these web scrapers were manually configured and were therefore only suitable for specific use cases. In contrast to existing platforms that primarily display paid job advertisements, Grizzly.jobs also records job offers that are not advertised on job boards.

Co-founder Christoph Ostertag emphasizes the importance of capturing comprehensive job data as a competitive advantage: “We want to become the platform with the most job ads in Austria this year.”

Grizzly.jobs Founding Team – Back: Kyrillos Mihani, Oliver Liebmann, Lukas Rachek; Front: Christoph Ostertag, Markus Herzberger

Share on social media:

Job Search Made Easy: Grizzly.jobs Develops AI-Based Web Scraping Technology