Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 9)
Check other articles in the series...SM: Your goal with SimplyHired is to skip the referral network to the extent it is possible, and to replace it with a combination of services available on the web which SimplyHired brings together for the candidate?
GG: Exactly. Over time a person’s social and professional affiliations will come online. People will use those connections to make decisions, whether it is finding a good place to eat, connecting with colleagues, or using referral hiring on SimplyHired.
SM: What did you have to do from a technology point of view that is dramatically different between your search technology and someone like Google?
GG: When you look at a generalized player like Google, it is very important to appreciate how different the use case is for somebody looking for a job versus somebody searching for a web site. When you go to Google you are typically looking for a given destination, you type it in, you get there and you are done. A job search is an ongoing process where you are delving deep into a much more complex decision. That involves very specialized factors, some of which I alluded to earlier. As a technologist I would tell you that the amount of enrichment that is going into the data set that we have sets us apart. One of Google’s major strengths it the scale of their crawl and how they creating inter-connectedness between all of the collected sites as well as how they extract meaning with their algorithms.
SM: They are a pure unstructured data search. In your case it is not a pure unstructured data search.
GG: We crawl a structured set of sites, but some of the data we collect such as the job descriptions can be unstructured.
SM: However, you put a level of structure into the data before the candidate interacts with it.
GG: Exactly. While we have a crawl and a feed-in infrastructure, that is not the core technology of our company. Our technology lies in the extraction. It is all about the normalization of the data, the de-duplication of data, the meta-data enrichment, and the classification.
From the beginning I have believed the value of a vertical player, search engine or otherwise, is to be able to participate in a greater lifecycle of the user. A vertical can help the user from the inception. For us, we are there when the user searches for the job, finds a potential job, and applies for the job.
We are probably only 10-15% of the way towards our overall mission. There are many things we can do that we have not yet done, and that is what makes it so great to be able to come to work here every day. It is a challenging problem. In the words of an entrepreneur who I read about some time ago, in order to create a big company you need a really big problem to solve. That is what we are talking about here. We are talking about the fact that this is a really big, important problem.
SM: You have lots of users. How did you get them?
GG: SimpylHired now has north of 5M users across the network. That places us number 5 in the US market. Three years out that is something we feel pretty good about. We get our traffic primarily through three sources. The first is workof mouth. The second is search engines, typically organic listings, and the third is through our partners. We have numerous job sites that we power. We buy almost none of our traffic today. That is something that I think is very, very important to recognize about the company.
SM: Did you have to buy eyeballs at the beginning?
GG: No we didn’t.
SM: Have you been organic all along?
GG: We have. We did experiment some with paid traffic, but well over 95% of our traffic comes from free sources.
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