Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 7)

SM: In your opinion, from where you sat in the spring of 2004, who were the top technology players serving that market?

GG: A natural place to start evaluating that market is to see where the dollars are coming. What is fascinating about the employment market is that besides employers and job seekers, which is historically how the market is thought of, there are 8 major sub-segments. These segments include job boards, staffing agencies, newspapers, applicant tracking systems, tracking and assessment folks, and people who provide infrastructure and employment. When you go broadly into HR you get a whole new set of folks. It is a very complex space with intricate channel structures, all which have evolved over years.

SM: In the dollar structure you cited did you include the HR service software?

GG: No, I am only included recruitment.
From our perspective when we looked at employers, and we looked at candidates, we saw a lot of dollars being spent but we did not see people who were happy or satisfied with the result. We spent three or four months looking at a potential set of solutions for different problems in this market.

SM: What were the problems? What were people dissatisfied with?

GG: Employers in this market went from having a very limited set of solutions with just newspapers to having a very, very broad set of solutions. They had too few resumes to suddenly being overwhelmed by resumes. On the sourcing side it is very difficult to get access to the right set of candidates. From a screening perspective it was very difficult to even find them. Trying to do quality measures in terms of how a candidate performed over time, and getting quality yield over time was near impossible because the tools just did not exists. There was an issue which was endemic with the entire process and how it was being conducted.

Candidates were also facing real problems. They were having difficulty locating the right opportunity. In 1994 and 1995 all of the jobs were literally sitting on two or three major job boards, but candidates now had too many options and boards to deal with. There are direct employers sites, news sites, all the various job boards, and some other places listing jobs. Candidates also had the issue of feeling very passive in this process. They would continue to apply for positions but would never hear anything back.

SM: On the other side they are overloaded with resumes.

GG: These were very endemic issues in this market. It would be naïve to believe we could walk in and solve the issues across the board in a market like this. We settled for the fact that we are creating a company whose mission is to do something better than it has ever been done. If you can’t have an ideal solution, perhaps you can have one that is better than any other solution out there. It takes your full commitment to make it better and better as each day goes by.

At SimplyHired we saw both sides of the equation. We even gained a more intuitive sense by opening a boutique staffing agency, which we did for two or three months, just to get a sense of what was going on in this market. We really saw everyone was serving the employer. It made sense because that was where the money was. The interesting thing is, if you go and talk to an employer and ask them what they are looking for, they will spend 100% of their time talking about candidates. No one was focusing on the candidate. SimplyHired was started as a company which would create the best job search experience on the planet. That is why we exist, what we strive to do, and we do it from the perspective of the candidate.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani
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