Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 1)

We have been reviewing the Online Jobs vertical at length, and in this interview, will be speaking with Paul Forster, co-Founder and CEO of vertical search engine Indeed.

SM: Please describe your personal background. PF: My professional background is in finance. I was an investment manager with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank, and wanted to start a business around the time I was very involved in recruiting finance professionals.

Using the internet for recruitment made a lot of sense and some successful job boards were already emerging, but there wasn’t a good finance-dedicated job board. So, in 1998, I founded Jobsinthemoney together with Rony Kahan who I had known since we did MBAs together at INSEAD business school in 1994. We grew this business to profitability before it was acquired in late 2003. Rony and I subsequently founded Indeed in 2004.

SM: Where did you get the idea for Indeed? What did you learn from your domain experience in the Jobs/Classified business? PF: Before Indeed.com was launched in late 2004, there was absolutely no search engine for jobs, in the sense of a service that aggregates job listings from around the web and makes them searchable by job seekers for free. Job seekers were faced with an escalating number of job boards and other places where jobs are listed, with no easy way to run a single search across these different websites.

Rony Kahan and I – the founders of Indeed – had previously run a finance-dedicated job board and so knew some of the things
missing from the online recruitment industry, in particular the lack of a comprehensive search engine for jobs. In launching Indeed.com, we went a long way towards fixing this problem – enabling job seekers to search millions of jobs from thousands of company websites, job boards, newspaper classifieds, associations and blogs. This is not only saving time for millions of job seekers, but also lets them find jobs they wouldn’t otherwise have found.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]

This segment is part 1 in the series : Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster
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