INTERVIEW: Rafael Bonnelly Ricart, Founder & CEO at Buskeros.com

The 27th Property Portal Watch Conference was held in Madrid this past November; it was our largest event thus far, with 400+ C-Level leaders attending from 40 different countries around the world, among them, Rafael Bonnelly Ricart, Founder and CEO at Buskeros, who was kind enough to sit down for an interview with us.

With a background in traditional media, Rafael Bonnelly Ricart ventured into the online classifieds realm via Todobusco, which was launched three years ago in Nicaragua, as a solution for media companies to transform their print classifieds into digital classifieds. "We found that there were a lot of media companies in the same situation in Latin American markets," said Bonnelly, "we've been in that market, we get it, and we saw that there was a need for it and my company was hired to address it."

Bonnelly said that once his company created the product and the process, they understood that the brand and the product itself could have a life beyond just being a SAS product for media companies, so they began pushing in that direction, "we started deploying it in other markets, like in Costa Rica and in Peru, and in the process, we found you guys [Online Marketplaces]".

"I met Simon Baker for the first time in Miami. I have become somewhat of a groupie of your company since, and I followed every conference, meeting people and understanding where the market has been going, and by doing so, I became aware of the fact that what we were doing was not competitive in the market, and that we needed to choose our fights, so to speak", said Bonnelly, adding that Todobusco was spread a bit all over, "We were cars, housing, employment and in general marketplaces, with really no hard financing behind. So we decided to pivot at the end of last year, and to concentrate on employment because we understood that employment was and is the driver for growth in all of our regions". But Bonnelly did not stop at just matching employer with employee "We understood that it's more about helping people develop careers and improving their knowledge, their livelihood and obviously planning their careers moving forward".

"So we took the employment site we had, which had some decent numbers, and it had an audience already coming to it organically, and we rebranded Empleobusco to Buskeros [in October, which is based on two things, the Spanish word busco meaning 'to seek' and busker which is a one-man-band. We thought it important to find a name which could work in any market and in either Spanish or English, which you could not do with Empleobusco, as it was limiting us to only the Spanish language market", elaborated Bonnelly. 

"We realized that employment was not enough, we needed to verify what the candidates actually were bringing to the table, so we needed to verify what their education level, what their proficiency of the English language is, their qualifications, etc. If they claim that they can code they need to prove that," he added. 

Buskeros uses Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to manage the job listings, and enable employer-employee communications via its digital evaluations platform powered by Mercer | Mettl from India, a learning management system with a catalog of 4,000 courses powered by Vértice Learning from Spain. The jobs portal also uses a chatbot powered by Portal.Chat to improve user conversion and an AI platform to segment and micro-target the audience, powered by EPICA.ai.

We asked Bonnelly what he was looking to take away from the Conference, "I'm going to be speaking, and one of the questions I will raise is 'have you ever heard of a job site which also sells houses?' We want to be the one", he said.

Bonnelly elaborated how Buskeros plans to combine Job Portal with Property Portal, "We look at a candidate's employment pattern; their employer to employee relationships from start to finish, how long they stayed at a company and we determine when they start thinking about making a change". Bonnelly explained that it is possible to determine, via the data accrued from resumes, how long until an employee starts "itching" for a change, and along with that if they have a history of moving cities, that makes them a perfect candidate/consumer for new property, or an offer to sell their house. "With the data we have, we are able to determine a person is due to start looking for another job before they even know they will be searching", said Bonnelly.

Over 400 attendees are expected at our next event - the Asian Property Portal Watch Conference in Thailand. The Conference will be held in Bangkok from 26th to 27th February 2020, and it will run for two days, featuring expert Industry Speakers, Innovative Companies at the forefront of the online real estate industry. The Asian Property Portal Watch Conference also offers amazing Social Events, a perfect opportunity for networking.
We hope to see you there.

Join us February 26-27 for the Property Portal Watch Conference Bangkok 2020.