The first hire that built the foundation.
How Cora became the operational backbone of a growing international recruitment agency, adapting across every function as the business and its candidates needed.
An agency building itself while serving people who needed real support.
YouWorkLife! is a recruitment agency specialising in placing international talent in shortage occupation roles in Austria and Germany. The work was complex by nature: navigating visa processes, compliance requirements, and the coordination between candidates, employers, and regulatory bodies across multiple countries.
The candidates were not just job seekers. They were people relocating their lives to countries they had never lived in, often without local contacts, local knowledge, or any idea of what came next. Being useful to them required more than process. It required patience, genuine care, and the willingness to be there at every step.
When Cora came on board, the team was three people and the business had no operational structure in place. The brief was simply: help. What that meant in practice took shape over time.
Three areas.
One direction.
Over three years the scope expanded as the team and the complexity of the operation grew. There was no single area of focus. The work moved between operations, admin, content, and candidate support depending on what the moment required.
Built and maintained the CRM from the ground up, ensuring candidate and client records were structured and usable as the team scaled. Alongside this, managed the day-to-day operational and administrative layer that kept the business running.
Developed comprehensive onboarding materials for candidates arriving in Austria, covering everything from practical first steps to navigating daily life in a new country. Written with real humanity for people who were starting from zero in an unfamiliar place.
Supported the collection and organisation of documents required for visa applications across multiple jurisdictions. A detail-intensive process with real consequences for the candidates involved, handled with care throughout.
Created and managed social media content to build the agency's presence and attract both candidates and clients. Developed the tone and early identity of the brand across platforms from the beginning.
Being there for people who had no one else to ask.
The candidate onboarding work was unlike any other part of the engagement. These were people arriving in Austria from all over the world, often alone, with no local network and no clear map for what to do next. Where to register. How the healthcare system worked. What to do on the first day, and the day after that.
This was before AI could answer those questions in seconds. Every guide, every resource, every response to a candidate question was built from research, from care, and from the understanding that getting this right mattered to a real person’s life.
When AI tools became available, the response was not to step back. It was to teach candidates how to use them. Guides were developed to help people navigate their new lives using the tools that were now available, turning a potential disruption into something genuinely useful for the people the agency was serving.
What it looks like when the brief is simply figure it out.
YouWorkLife! is the clearest example of what Cora does at its best. There was no neat list of deliverables, no defined scope, no category this work fits into cleanly. There was a business that needed someone to come in, understand what was missing, and build it. That is what happened.
Across three years the work touched operations, compliance, content, systems, and the deeply human task of helping people start over somewhere new. None of it was handed over with a brief. All of it was figured out alongside a team that was itself figuring things out.
That capacity – to adapt, to learn fast, to hold multiple things at once without losing quality or care – is what Cora is built around.
“We did not fully know what we needed when we started. There were a lot of moving parts, and it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what skills were needed. What we got with Clarice was someone who figured that out with us, built what was missing, and showed up for every part of the business with the same care every time, and that is not easy to find.”