Welcome to the Jungle (Otta) review: curated startup jobs, with limits

What it is now

Otta launched in London as a matching product: instead of a search box, you set preferences — role, level, salary, remote, company size, what you care about — and it shows a curated feed, one role at a time, with a short 'why this matches you'. Welcome to the Jungle, a French company with a large employer-branding business, acquired it in 2024. The candidate product still works the way Otta did; the company profiles are now backed by Welcome to the Jungle's editorial content, which is where it pulls ahead of every other board.

Free for candidates. Companies pay to be listed, which is both the quality filter and the coverage limit.

What it does well

• —The matching is genuinely good. If your preferences are honest, the feed is mostly roles you'd apply to — a higher hit rate than any keyword search.
• —Company profiles: team, funding, what the product is, benefits, sometimes interviews with staff. The best pre-interview reading on any job platform.
• —Salary shown where companies provide it, and a visible push on companies to provide it.
• —UK and EU coverage that US-built boards don't have.
• —It respects your time. One role at a time, a reason for each, no infinite scroll of noise.

Where it falls short

• —Stage. Companies have to pay to be on it, and the ones that do are funded scaleups — Series A and beyond, tens to hundreds of employees. The seed-stage company hiring its fourth engineer usually isn't there.
• —Shared matches. Curation cuts the noise but not the competition: the roles it shows you are the roles it shows everyone with your profile.
• —Timing. Roles appear when a company posts to the platform, after its own careers page. It's not late the way LinkedIn is late, but it isn't early.
• —Coverage outside the UK, EU and US is thin.

Who it's for

Someone in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam or the larger US cities who wants a scaleup role — Series A to growth stage — and would rather see ten good matches than a hundred results. Product, design and engineering roles especially; it has less for sales and operations.

Less so for: people targeting seed-stage companies; anyone outside its core markets; and anyone whose problem is that good matches attract crowds.

How we compare, honestly

Welcome to the Jungle is better than us at telling you what a company is like to work at, and its matching is more polished than our filters. We cover more stages — we track 4,700+ funded startups from seed upward — and we're earlier, because we watch careers pages rather than waiting for a listing. The sensible pairing: theirs for the shortlist, ours for hearing first.