For job seekers, search is out, 'curation' is in
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Mobile is changing how we search for jobs.
Instead of sitting in front of a computer and searching listings, the top job sites want to figure out your talents and make suggestions instead, within a mobile app.
“We’ve become more of a matchmaker,” says Ian Siegel, the CEO of ZipRecruiter, at its headquarters here. “Making sure the right job seeker is talking to the right employer.”
Zip's mobile app, for instance, on opening greets registered users by suggesting new job listings. It sends out over 10 million mobile alerts daily about posts.
It's far from alone. LinkedIn, Monster, GlassDoor and Indeed are touting job searches on their mobile apps. Zip argues it does a better job of connecting highly qualified contacts to employers through advanced use of basic search optimization skills, such as re-writing listings to make them more clickable, and focus on mobile, where the job seekers are.
Zip is a six-year-old start-up in the Silicon Beach area of Los Angeles that does something many tech start-ups don't — it turns a profit. Siegel wouldn't say how much, but disclosed revenues that are growing quickly: $140 million expected in 2016, up from $100 million in 2015. Revenue is up 270% since 2013. Zip makes most of its money by charging $249 monthly to employers to post the listings.
The challenge: to keep the good times humming along, avoiding the fate of once high-flying Monster.com (MWW), which has seen revenues drop to $$667 million in 2015, from $725 million the previous year, and its stock price sink to under $5 from about $50 in 2007.
No. 1-ranked Indeed was sold for nearly $1 billion in 2012, a feat Zip would like to one day surpass.
Online job services like these have become a huge business. They were worth around $15 billion globally in 2015, according to market researcher Staffing Industry Analysts.
The market is dominated by Japan-based Recruit Holdings, which owns the job sites Indeed, Advantage and Ains Partner. ZipRecruiter places 14th worldwide in terms of revenue, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, and fifth in the U.S. for monthly traffic, according to researcher comScore Media Metrix. It estimates Zip had 10.3 million visitors in June 2016, up 17% in a year.
"There is a $1 trillion opportunity trapped inside there, in the U.S. alone,” says Siegel. “Because 5 million businesses are spending almost no money on recruiting. The recent acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $26 billion) proves that the hiring industry isn’t slowing down in any sense.”
LinkedIn is primarily thought of as a social network for enterprise, but has also quietly become a major site for finding white collar jobs. It charges seekers a $29.99 monthly subscription for a more advanced search (some posts are free) and employers $399 a month. .
Zip has a different model. It charges employers but offers seekers access to its 6 million postings for free. These include all available online postings, mostly aimed at folks who work at small to medium businesses, but also has 300,000 to 400,000 of its own postings, which it then shares on other services as well.
With so many sites having so many of the same listings, what makes Zip unique?
"We’re more of a curation than a search experience," says Siegel. "We have all the information, and the resumes—we know what jobs you should be looking for—and we tell you."
Now employing 400 people, Zip was formed by Siegel, Will Redd, Joe Edmonds and Ward Poulos over a coffee table in 2010.
“We had no idea when we started that we’d appeal to such a broad audience,” says Siegel. “When we first built it, we thought we were just building a solution for employers,” but then job seekers started using the site. “We track north of 1 million hires a year through our service,” he says.
The company is backed mostly by Institutional Venture Partners, which has invested $63 million in Zip.
Siegel's goal is to get to the point where with machine learning, the Zip computers can select the job and get it out to the perfect applicant, without him or her requesting it. He hopes to get closer to that goal by 2017, he says.
“The future of job search is to remove the word search,” says Siegel. “It will be curation.”
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