Jobinder

My name is Cláudio Esteves. I come from a family of tradespeople and shopkeepers in the north of Portugal. My father ran an accounting firm and small businesses on the side. I've spent the last fifteen years working in marketing, software and small business — and the whole time, I've watched skilled trades get the short end of every recruitment tool the internet has built.

LinkedIn is designed for office work. Indeed is designed for volume. Recruitment agencies are designed to charge 15-25% of a salary they had nothing to do with earning. None of these are built fora plumber who wants to know if the company down the road is hiring, what they pay, and whether they'd be a fit. None of these are built for a contractor in Utrecht who needs to find a welder this month without wading through 200 unfiltered CVs.

Jobinder is the answer I wish had existed when my brother was looking for his first proper electrical job in Holland, and when a Portuguese friend in Eindhoven kept losing weeks to interviews that ended with a salary 30% below the conversation. It's a swipe-and-match app, because that mechanic works — both sides express interest, both sides decide. It's built specifically for trades, because that's the slice of the labour market that has been most consistently neglected by the platforms. It's free for workers forever, because charging a tradesperson to find a job is something I'll never do.

What we won't do

This is the part I want to be loudest about.

We won't run an opaque ranking algorithm.No “desirability score,” no pay-to-be-seen. Every worker in your trade and city shows up in the feed. The order is chronological. That's the whole thing.
We won't hide salary information.Both sides declare a number upfront. If you don't want to declare yours, this isn't the platform for you.
We won't take a cut of the salary.When you and a company agree on a job through Jobinder, that conversation is yours. We don't insert ourselves between you and them.
We won't train AI on your messages or your photos. We won't sell your data. We won't serve you ads on someone else's site because of what you put in your profile.
We won't lock you in.One click in account settings and you're out, with everything you uploaded deleted within 30 days.

What we'll try to do

We'll try to make the most honest recruitment app in the Netherlands for skilled trades. Not the slickest, not the biggest, not the loudest — the most honest. If we say the company pays €3,500, the company pays €3,500. If we say there's no algorithm boosting some profiles over others, there isn't.

We'll try to be useful to immigrants who came here for the work and have never once been treated as a real candidate by an Indeed algorithm tuned for white-collar applicants. We'll try to be useful to small Dutch building companies that can't afford a full-time recruiter and shouldn't need one.

We'll try to publish honest writing about how the Dutch trade market actually works — CAO Bouw tables, KvK verification, the negotiations nobody teaches you. The blog is part of the product.

Where we are now

Jobinder launches in the Netherlands in June 2026. The product works end-to-end: signup, swipe, match, chat, email notifications. The pool is small at first — that's honest. If you sign up in the first month, you're seeing the platform at its most empty. That's the trade-off for being early.

I'm the founder. The team is small and growing slowly. Our outreach is run by L. Esteves (my brother), in Dutch / English / Portuguese, in the trades communities where workers actually spend their evenings. There's no marketing department, no growth-hack team, no SEO agency. There's a worker who needs a better job and a company that needs a real candidate, and we try to put them in a chat together.

If you're considering joining, sign up. If you've signed up and have feedback, email me directly: claudio@jobinder.app. Every email gets read.

— Cláudio