Jelmer Zuidema is co-founder of Roadtrip and of Roadtrip Explorer. He started almost nine years ago as an intern at Wonderkind, never finished his studies because the practical side appealed to him far more, and watched that company grow from a handful of people to more than a hundred and twenty. Seven years ago he founded Roadtrip Agency together with his business partner Jelmer Koppelmans, an agency that solves the grey area between the career site, the ATS and recruitment campaigns through tagging, tracking and analytics. A year and a half ago Roadtrip Technologies followed, with the product Roadtrip Explorer: one place where data from ATS systems and career sites come together, so recruiters and recruitment marketers finally speak the same language. In this episode of Selection Talks he talks about data quality, running two companies side by side, growing without investors and why entrepreneurship is a marathon rather than a sprint.
Q: How did Jelmer Zuidema of Roadtrip become an entrepreneur in the recruitment world?
A: Through an internship at Wonderkind, where he stayed on and never finished his studies. Almost nine years ago he joined a company that was doing what was then called mass advertising for recruitment, a term he says has almost become a dirty word now that everything has to be hyper-targeted and personalised. He was hire number two or three and saw the company shoot up to more than a hundred and twenty people. He found the practical execution far more enjoyable than school, and since he already knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, he saw it as a good opportunity to learn there and grow from that point onwards. Which is exactly what happened.
Q: Why did Jelmer Zuidema and Jelmer Koppelmans start Roadtrip Agency for themselves?
A: Because at Wonderkind the service stopped at clicks, while the most important question stayed unanswered: what happens on your site afterwards? The reports were good and clients were happy with the volume, but what those clicks turned into in terms of actual people did not fit the service or the strategy. Jelmer and his business partner Jelmer Koppelmans found that too minimal. They built it up calmly: both spent several days a week on interim work, including three days at Booking.com, and two to three days on their own agency. There they noticed how quickly their knowledge was valued. An important next step was turning loose interim hours into fixed projects, because selling hours is not scalable.
Q: Where does the name Roadtrip come from?
A: From the word journey: the candidate journey that Roadtrip wants to make as pleasant as possible. Using data they can show how that journey can be better or faster, and how it can start and end better for a specific candidate. That is how they arrived at the name in a fairly philosophical way. What they forgot was to check whether the domain was still available: roadtrip.com turned out to be a travel platform, so it became roadtrip.agency. That worked well for a long time, even though they regularly had to explain that there is no .com after it. Now that a second company sits alongside it, that .agency extension is harder to maintain.
Q: What exactly does Roadtrip Agency do?
A: It resolves the grey area between the career site, the ATS and the campaigns. There is a lot in that area: tagging, pixels that need to be implemented properly, consent banners that actually work. On top of that the agency delivers analytics implementations and analytics reporting, with several people and at a larger scale. Its clients are mainly large corporates, with the occasional excursion into SMEs, healthcare or government. Almost all of those corporates have international offices, which fuelled Roadtrip's international ambition from the start. Unlike Wonderkind, which sits more in staffing and recruitment agency work, Jelmer says his former employer can now hardly ever be seen as a competitor.
Q: What is Roadtrip Explorer and which problem does it solve?
A: Explorer links the results from the ATS to the figures from the career site, so you can match quantity with quality. At the agency Jelmer saw that data often stopped at a submitted form: you know how many applications there are, for which role and where they came from, but not how good a candidate is. That only becomes clear during selection or in the ATS. Explorer has integrations with various ATS systems and its own tracking method for the career site, and puts all data into one database. That reveals which sources actually deliver candidates who progress. Candidates from LinkedIn, for example, often move through the process better.
Q: Why is a database alone not enough for clients?
A: Because clients do not want to keep developing things themselves. As data nerds, Jelmer and his partner were initially happy with one large database: nice to tinker with and see what comes out. They naively assumed clients would load that data into a Power BI themselves, but companies are not that far along yet, and most people in recruitment switch off the moment you say Power BI. It has to be ready to use. That also changed the mindset: you are not developing for yourself but for a client, and then usability and how you design a login suddenly weigh more heavily than how elegant the technology underneath is.
Q: Why does 90% of recruitment dashboards go unused according to Jelmer Zuidema?
A: Because the process often starts with faulty or incomplete data. Jelmer sees a great many dashboards out there in the market, but dares to say that ninety percent of them sit idle: they might get opened once a quarter when the management team or a stakeholder asks for a report. The rest of the time it is fallow internet, while all kinds of constructions are being maintained to keep them running. He thinks that is a waste. A dashboard built on poor data generates questions you cannot answer, and the moment that happens, stakeholders lose trust in all the data that follows.
Q: How does Roadtrip Explorer keep data quality manageable and verifiable?
A: By putting all data in its own database and layering alerts on top of it. Explorer signals a 404, a missing job title or a job ID that is not there. Those are exactly the things that do not happen in a tool like GA4: if you miss it there, you also miss it in your report. Jelmer wants an error to be solved at the moment it occurs, which may mean a small dip in the report but keeps the data valid. The data refreshes every two hours, because in his view real time does not really exist in the real world, and every two hours is enough to spot in good time whether something is right.
Q: Why did Roadtrip Explorer become a separate company alongside the agency?
A: Because building a product requires a different type of people. The agency employs marketing consultants: broadly educated, with broad interests and a broad skill set. For a product you need developers. Jelmer and Jelmer Koppelmans quickly saw that this became a split: you want to scale on developers, but you do not want to pay for them out of the agency. So a year and a half ago they set up Roadtrip Technologies, with its own structure of holding companies, so that from the start it was cleanly two businesses. Explorer emerged from that. In terms of entrepreneurship he thinks it was the right move.
Q: How did Roadtrip grow without investors?
A: By letting the agency fund the development of Explorer. In the early days it was very convenient that they could pay themselves out of the agency while working on Explorer; that is no longer necessary and both companies now stand on their own feet. As a result they have always been able to go their own way. Koppelmans is strong on finance, and around them sits a good circle of advisors with VC and recruitment backgrounds who think along about what is smart. It has been suggested a few times that an investor could make them move faster, but then you often do it someone else's way and you give away a piece of control. For now things are going well and they can keep growing.
Q: Why do employers now have too many applicants instead of too few?
A: Because applying has become easier and more accessible, with AI on top of that. Lately clients come to Jelmer with too many people in the funnel: one open role and a thousand applicants. Besides AI-written applications, he thinks this simply comes from people being much better at finding where they can apply, and from most organisations having a decent portal. The idea that more applications is always better is still dominant, but he expects it to disappear at some point. Your funnel should be open, but not so open that anyone can walk in. That is why easy applies are being rolled back, even though in his view effort does not automatically equal quality.
Q: What is the ambition for Roadtrip Explorer?
A: To become the standard for recruitment marketing analytics, the way GA4 is for websites. Jelmer describes the moment of success concretely: an interim professional who worked with Explorer at one company and logs in again at the next, with the same reference points to judge what is going well and what is not. So that someone can say: I saw this at my previous employer too, and I think this is the solution. The dashboard is an intermediate step in that. The real dream is a task list per stakeholder, whether recruiter, recruitment manager, recruitment marketer or agency, with concrete items: there are too many 404s in your campaign period, or this funnel can be optimised. Because the core question is: the campaign delivers people but no hires, where does it go wrong?
Q: What advice does Jelmer Zuidema give to starting entrepreneurs?
A: Stick to your hours and do not believe in the eighty-hour myth. Jelmer has many starting entrepreneurs around him and has also seen people leave with burnout. His reasoning: you are far more stable and flexible when you are rested, and the grind is no paradise and no guarantee of better money. An email that lands on Monday morning can perfectly well be answered on Monday afternoon. Invest your time in relationships and in getting your administration properly in order rather than in scrolling LinkedIn at night for the next lead. It is a marathon, not a sprint. Reacting calmly and with empathy when something breaks saves him, in his own words, eight hours of headache.
