The initial launch – alpha version

It’s been a while since my last post. Sorry everyone for not being able to update more often. The team has been busy working on the site and we are planning to launch next week. It has been tough the last couple of months, our development team works 24/7 to make sure that all the features work properly. I am sure, just like with any other site, that we will find lots of bugs after the initial launch. But our mantra is to launch early and launch often. We decided to launch to the public early and then try to get as much feedback as possible and make adjustments based on users’ responses so that we can rollout more features that people really like or would like to have. This is really an initial launch or alpha launch if you will. The site is far from perfect; our goal is to provide users with the features that they really want rather than instant perfection. But we are confident that once people get to know the site, they will see the difference that we offer and will fall in love with the site. So, take a test drive on the site and let us know what you think.

uCareer’s Address Management System- a centralized address book and more

If you’re like me, you probably have several different email addresses: your school or company’s email, hotmail, gmail or AOL/Netscape emails. Have you ever wanted to create a centralized, simple, web-based address book (contact manager, organizer) to hold addresses, emails, phone numbers and birthdays, vCard, and other important info? Well, no worries. Centralized address book is just one of the many features that we are working on at uCareer to help our members manage their career and their personal and professional networks.

uCareer’s centralized address book is a flexible and powerful address management system that utilizes the power of MySQL and PHP to manage all your contact information. There is virtually no limit to the number of addresses or the type of information you can add per person, you can also sort entries into groups, export email addresses, view a list of upcoming birthdays, and much more (you can also import all your instant message to our MySQL database if you’d like to do so).

I promise this will be the coolest address book you’ve ever had, and, of course, just like many other features we provide at uCareer, it will be absolutely FREE to you, our members!

How to build a dynamic website – uCareer’s architecture:

At the back end, we use LAMP bundled with a little bit of a twist. MySQL is really good for keeping and querying a user ID and matching it with additional personal info. At a higher level, we use Python to synchronize objects such as videos and resumes to profiles stored through MySQL, Python also has more flexibility with search tags and so on. We use Solr to talk to Python, to relay and retrieve data during search operations. PHP comes in as the kind of bridge we need to communicate between the HTML and the back-end so that the user can get what they want to be presented with.

At the front end, we use Django as our framework. We like Django’s loose coupling and strict separation between pieces of an application’s philosophy. It’s very easy to make changes to one particular piece of the application without affecting the other pieces. For example, in view functions, it’s very important to separate the business logic from the presentation logic by using a template system. With the database layer, we’re applying that same philosophy to data access logic. Django is well suited for making database-driven Web sites. Amazon.com is a great example of a database-driven site. We also like Django’s URLconf system that encourages the use of pretty URLs by making them easier to use than not to.

4 keys to build a successful website

Be simple. Make your site simple in design and easy to navigate. Google is probably the best example of how simplicity can make you succeed. In the online job space, the top three are all very much web1.0 designed to squeeze in as many ads as they can to distract you. You’d think that they would be happy with the billion dollars they make per year through job postings, but no, they have to put all those annoying ads next to your profile and search results to make even more. At uCareer, we will not irritate our members with exasperating ads.

Be focused. FaceBook started out with one single school, Harvard, and was only open to college students until late 2005. So, build your technology and test it in a very well defined, targeted group of people before rolling it out to the whole world.

Be viral. Provide what your customers want. Your early adopters will be your best sales team and they will reach out to their friends for you if you give them some incentives to do so. I’ve had very successful experiences at both Revver and Thoof; a little gift/prize goes a long way. On average it costs about $5 to $10 to acquire each new user for a new social site, so it is actually cheaper to give out a couple of iPods to motivate your early adopters to be your evangelists. Of course, they need your help, so build PHP/cURL address books or similar tools to make their life easier.

Build API. Viral alone is not going to take you very far. Building API is the best way to create affiliates and partnerships to reach out to the massive audience out there.

What will the online job industry landscape be like in five years?

I received a couple of emails this week asking me what the online job search industry landscape will be like in five years. I firmly believe that in five years the industry won’t be dominated by the current top three players, rather it will be taken over by a new generation of career websites and search engines, here’s why:

      1) If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that the current results from search engines are far from perfect (I’m writing another post about how job search engines can improve their results and will post next week). I believe that they will solve these problems in the next five years. Job search engines will have improved so much that most job seekers can find any job by a click of a button at Indeed or SimplyHired (hey guys, I really have high hopes for you, don’t let me down). Based on my research, 90-95% of real openings (not those used to fish for candidates) are actually listed on either the company’s career site or their recruiter’s site, so in five years the search engines will be smart enough to bypass Monster, Careerbuilder and HotJobs to directly cull jobs from individual company or headhunter sites. So there’s really no reason for job seekers to use Monster, Careerbuilder or HotJobs anymore.

      2) New generation user-centric career sites, uCareer will be one of them, will host career profiles for a majority of people in the workforce, almost everyone will have a profile with one of those sites. Employers will directly search the database and pay a fee to contact the right candidates. The current $400, every 30 days posting will be gone, employers will only pay either when they directly contact the candidates or when qualified candidates apply for the job.

I’m not declaring the death of Monster, Careerbuilder or HotJobs, but rather the old way of doing business. Remember the travel agency at the corner down the street five years ago? They’re long gone, as will Monster, Careerbuilder and HotJobs be if they don’t change to meet the challenge.

My thoughts on user acquisition

 

What is the biggest challenge for any new website? In my opinion, it is, by far, customer acquisition. How to get your message out, how to get customers to visit your site and now to keep them once they are there are the most important questions any entrepreneur should ask himself/herself before even starting to build a site. I’ve been pondering a lot on uCareer’s marketing strategy recently. In addition to reading about three online marketing books in the past month, I’ve spent quite some time talking to some of the marketing gurus in the online space. Here are some of my thoughts:

#1) How to get your message out (branding): it’s hard and easy. You should have a very clear message: what is the problem you are going to solve and why are you different from others trying to accomplish the same thing. I like to talk directly to my audience, so for now I am using my blog as my communications platform to let people know what uCareer is and why it is different. I also did some interviews over the past couple of weeks, and there are still more coming. In my previous experience, Revver was pretty successful in terms of branding. It really set itself apart from the rest of the online video pack and was perceived as cool, revolutionary and somewhat rebellious, something that fit well with Revver’s targeted audience.

#2) How to get people to talk about your site and, better yet, actually visit the site. In order to do that, you need to take advantage of viral marketing and find some creative ways to communicate them to your targeted audiences. The Coca-Cola and Mentos video created a million views within days and attracted thousands of new members to Revver. At Thoof, our Thoof vs Digg video also drew in more than 20 times new traffic than average from Digg within one day.

#3) How to make visitors become members and stay with you, in other words, how to make your site sticky. This is, in my opinion, the most challenging of the three. In my previous two ventures, we were able to generate buzz in both cases. In the case of Revver, we successfully kept most of the traffic generated by the famous Coca-Cola and Mentos video. But in the case of Thoof, we were not very successful in keeping the traffic generated by the very funny Thoof vs Digg video. One of the reasons for that is that Internet users are, in general, very fickle. Another very important reason is that even though Thoof has a superior technology compared to Digg, it is very difficult for new viewers to see and take advantage of that cool, personalized technology during their average two-minute visit. For most of them, Thoof was just another Digg-like site with similar features and functionalities. So, at uCareer we’ve learned our lesson. We are not only architecturing a set of applications which are far better at the back end, we are also designing some very distinguishing, first-in-industry, features and applications that users will find different and refreshing from the start.

Is this space too crowded?

I was told a couple times this week that people love uCareer’s idea but they are concerned that this online job searching space is too crowded. Yes, there is no question about it: This space is very crowded, but it is crowded with the WRONG crowd. If you ask the job seekers out there, 9 out of 10 (if not all of them) would say that they are frustrated with the current players out there. Too many sites out there but no simple and easy way to manage them, too many postings out there, but too few real openings, tedious, painfully time consuming and often dubious application processes. This reminds me of Salesforce.com. When it first came out in the late 1990s, several big players dominated the CRM space and nobody believed that Salesforce.com would make it in that overcrowded space. But Salesforce.com not only made it, it made it big. Why? It was simply because even though the space was crowded and dominated by big competitors, the customers were frustrated by the arduous, complicated and inflexible tools that other CRMs had to offer. All Salesforce.com did was to provide what the customers wanted: a simple, easy and intuitive CRM tool. There was nothing revolutionary about it. In fact, because I loved it so much, I started a company helping others to design and implement CRM tools. At uCareer, we clearly understand the challenges out there, but we see more opportunities in this space as well. Why are we so confident? Because we know we are working on something our customers really want and desperately need.

How will the Microsoft and Yahoo deal impact the online job search industry?

Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, a 62% premium over Yahoo’s recent price. I have no idea whether Yahoo’s board will say yes (I can’t find a solid reason to say no). Let’s just assume that this deal will go through: a combined MS and Yahoo also means a combined CareerBuilder and HotJobs, which will represents more than 50% of the market share and will put huge pressure on Monster. So, let’s make another assumption: after years of rumor, Monster decides to be acquired by Google. So instead of three 800-pound gorillas, we will have two 1000-pound gorillas in this space. Now, what does mean to the industry? I think there will be some further consolidations among the top players, and this is exactly a great opportunity for a new generation of job search sites to emerge. While the top players are busy searching for their synergy and continuing to try their best to please the employers, a new generation of career sites built on the belief of user-centric thinking will gain a larger user base by providing easy to use, more user friendly services and applications.

While others see chaos, we see opportunities. There is no better situation for this quote from JFK: “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters–one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

Matchmakers in the job search space – Part Two

I’ve heard a lot of buzz recently about JobFox (they closed a $20 million plus round) and decided to take a test drive (sorry for not doing this earlier, as I’ve been really swamped). I was asked to take a personality test when I tried to upload my file and JobFox exclaimed, “We’ve built a revolutionary new job fit engine that’s smart as a fox: it knows how to match people and jobs on The 10 Dimensions of a Good Job Fit”. Sound familiar? You bet! This is exactly equivalent to eHarmony’s 29 dimensions compatibility test. While JobFox does give each job seeker a homepage, it’s just a resume in a different layout. It seems quite a stretch to call this “revolutionary” when it is in fact a little twist on the old game. Looking for the answer, I checked the executive team page. No wonder! The founder of JobFox also founded Careerbuilder!

I’ve probably been watching too much of the presidential debates lately, but this comes to mind when I think about JobFox, ”Real change is never going to happen if all we do is send the same people back to Washington to sit in different chairs.” We all know that we need to bring some real change to the online job search space, but simply changing the format of the resume or using multi-dimension tests won’t do it. We need to change the employer-centric thinking to user-centric thinking. At uCareer, we understand that the 21^st century is all about the competition for talent, only those who provide the best tools for the users will succeed. The 21^st century deserves a new kind of approach, and a new generation of candidates deserves a new kind of service. The fundamental problem that I have with these job matchmakers is that they assume the candidates don’t have the time or are incapable of making their own career decisions, so the matchmakers do it for them. That’s not what we believe. We believe the problem is that the administrative issues in the job search and career management process are tedious. This is the area where candidates need help. At uCareer, we encourage job seekers to spend more time thinking about and planning their career and to take control of their career rather than handing it over to matchmakers asking them to decide their future. Furthermore, I am not a fan of this faceless, secretive way of job matching. I just don’t believe employers will be able to make a decision by reading a faceless resume. As I mentioned before, uCareer’s members will be able to present themselves in a brand new way so that our candidates won’t have to go through meaningless screening interviews, and when they do go to an interview they will know that they are qualified and more likely to get the position.

I spend a lot of time talking with job seekers, especially young people in their 20s or 30s. What they want and deserve is a new kind of online job tool that helps them streamline the tedious administrative stuff so that they can focus on what is more important: thinking about and planning their future. At uCareer, we firmly believe that you CAN have a career by being yourself.

Indeed vs SimplyHired vs Oodle – Round #Two

As promised, I conducted a second round of comparisons for these top three job search engines at exactly 10:30 PM central time last night. The results are as follows:

Overall rankings:

#1: Indeed. Indeed and SimplyHired are virtually tied in terms of search results relevancy. SimplyHired returned one CEO opening at the top of the results (the only one listed in the top ten results). Once again, Indeed lists two assistants to the CEO as top results, but it did return two CEO openings right after those (the only ones among the top ten results). So if we just compare the search results it’s a tie, but given the reasons that I mentioned last time (SimplyHired put sponsor links over such results that were not even relevant in this case), I give Indeed #1.

#2: SimplyHired. (For reasons mentioned above)

#3: Oodle. Oodle continues to underperform compared to the other two competitors. There were no CEO positions in the top three listings at all. The first one didn’t occur until the seventh listing (even worse than last time).

 

Here are the screenshots:

 

Matchmakers in the job search space

Previously, I talked about some search engines in the job search space and how uCareer is different from them. Today I want to talk about some sites trying to match candidates with job posts, aka matchmakers, in job search space. One of those players is Itzbig and it’s located in Austin as well. Itzbig has a pretty unique approach; it claims that they can use their proprietary technology to privately match your skills and requirements with potential openings. It sounds like an old-time matchmaker to me.

I tried to put this to the test. I tried to do a CEO search again, but could not find a CEO listing on the dropdown, so I chose “Business Development” instead. While Indeed, SimplyHired and Oodle all suggested that there are many Business Development openings in Austin, Itzbig only recommended me a list of marketing openings. I can only imagine it’s because those business development openings are not part of Itzbig’s postings. In other words, Itzbig only matches you with the jobs on their site. They will not be able to recommend to you any other matches even if there are hundreds of those openings on other sites. It sounds more and more like an old-time matchmaker who would only match you with the people she knew no matter how many good matches were out there.

At uCareer, out approach is different: You’ll have access to millions of jobs out there and best of all, we will connect you with the right job regardless of where it’s posted. Furthermore, we don’t want to mystify the process and pretend that we know more about your career needs than you do. Yes, we do have proprietary technology and applications, but it’s you who makes the decisions regarding what you want and how you get there. It doesn’t matter how the software/algorithms work. At end of the day, it’s the job seekers who make the call. We will make your job searching and application less painful and as efficient as possible, but we don’t want to be the matchmaker to decide your career for you. After all, it’s your career!

I am not a fan of mystifying technology or applications or processes in order to charge a premium, 29 dimensions compatibility test? eHarmony seems to be trying too hard to get you to sign on with them. We don’t believe the online job search industry needs the equivalent of eHarmony. Rather, we believe that you know what you want more than anyone else; you just need an easy to use, more user-friendly tool to help you manage and it is exactly what we are trying to do at uCareer.

Authentication and Authorization

Like any host-based system, the authentication and authorization processes are very important to uCareer as well. The balance between being secure and simple/easy to use is critical to uCareer’s overall success.

Authentication and authorization are tightly coupled mechanisms. Authentication is the verification of the credentials of the connection attempt. This process consists of sending the credentials from the remote-access client, our members, through a token to our RAS (uCareer’s server) in a plain text or an encrypted form using an authentication protocol. At uCareer, We firmly believe that a secure authentication should rely on two separate items: software (a password) and hardware (a device, most likely our user’s computer). Authorization, on the other hand, is the verification that the connection attempt is allowed, in other words who accesses what. In our case, job seekers, advertisers and employers all have different access to secured resources on our server. Authorization should only occur after successful authentication. We are currently testing with .NET Framework role-based security to determine whether to allow a specific principal to access our code and to implement authorization.

Google is coming to town!

Well, it’s official. Google is coming to Austin and planning to hire more than 100 people in the downtown area. That’s good news for Austin, but bad news for tech entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their ventures. While the real estate developers, real estate agents, restaurant and bar owners, software engineers, car dealers and some lucky massage therapists (I am assuming Google will have a massage parlor in their Austin office as well) might be exultant about this news, tech entrepreneurs like myself should be really concerned about the intensifying competition for talent. I moved to Austin from California to get away from firms like Google, Yahoo, FaceBook and other billion dollar companies and thought that it might be easier to find talent here. Not anymore. Just last month, one designer turned down my offer and took a job at FaceBook. Look, I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t join a bootstrapping company with a couple of months runway either.

So what should you do if you are bootstrapping and need to recruit more talent? A couple of things that you might want to do include 1) pushing the development and bring the products to the market earlier, 2) trying to get VCs involved earlier so that your business looks more credible. Besides the concerns as an entrepreneur, I can’t help wondering will life in Austin be like it is in California?

The online job searching industry is broken!

Recently, I had a talk with an online job searching insider and he said to me, “The online job searching industry is broken”. I couldn’t agree more. Can you find another industry that has grown exponentially in terms of revenue but has not had any real change in the way they do business over the past 10 years? I can’t name one. You’d think that a company with billion dollar revenues and more than 700 million in profits should rollout some sort of app/tools to make their user’ life easier. No. Nada.

Why is that you may wonder. The reason is simple. The big 3, CareerBuilder, Monster and HotJobs, only care about the advertisers and HR people on the corporation side, because for them that is where the money is. They spend huge amounts of money and resources building relationships with HR departments in companies because they believe that as long as they have the jobs posted on their sites, the job seekers will keep coming regardless of whether they can provide a more user friendly app for their users. What they don’t realize is that without you, the individual user, no company will post jobs there, not to mention they make millions of dollars by forcing you to put up with those irrelevant and sometimes very distracting ads they put next to your search or your profile.

At uCareer, we see things differently. We believe that you, our users, are our most important asset. So we started this venture with only one goal in mind, to make YOUR life easier, because we believe that finding a fulltime job doesn’t have to be a fulltime job. Our proprietary technology, CareerOnDemand, will provide you with a user friendly, easy to use tool to make your job search go smoothly with maximum efficiency.

There are several new sites that have already brought some changes to this space. As I mentioned before, Indeed, SimplyHired and Oodle provide a Google-like search engine to help job seekers get access to all the jobs out there; great effort and my hat’s off to them. But simply providing all the jobs to job seekers only solves part of the problem. They don’t provide tools or services to do anything beyond searching, and for me the most tedious job is not the search but what after you got those results (assumedly good, but I am not convinced, please see my previous post regarding these job search engine.) This is the reason why uCareer is designed to be an integrator and provide services beyond what those aggregators do.

Of course, we won’t be able to accomplish all this without you, the job seekers. If you share our vision and passion, you can either join us to be part of the change, or you can send us some feedback and suggestions as to what you think needs to be done. Or you can just continue supporting us by reading this blog and help us get the message out.

Indeed vs SimplyHired vs Oodle – Round #1

 

There are 3 major job search aggregators out there. Each one of them claims that they have access to thousands of job sites, career sites, newspapers, etc. So I decided to put their words to the test. At exact 2:20 PM central time today, I did a CEO search in Austin on these 3 sites simultaneously. The results are below. Here is my ranking:

1) Relevancy:

#1: SimplyHired. They provided 3 CEO openings at the top of result, so it’s best!

#2: Indeed. The first result was an opening for an assistant to the CEO. Not exactly what I searched for, but there was a CEO post listed right after the assistant position, so I give 2^nd place to Indeed. Somebody has to figure out an intelligent way to recognize that assistant to CEO is actually less relevant than say COO or VP. Of course, there is no reason to put them above a CEO opening.

#3: Oodle. There was no CEO position in the top 3 listings at all. The first one didn’t occur until the 6^th listing.

2) Page Design:

#1: Indeed. I like the simple, clear and Google-like design; very user friendly.

#2: Oodle. I am not a big fan of the design, but no ads yet, so good for now.

#3: SimplyHired. Two sponsored ads are above the result, money over user experience. This is something that even Google would not even dare to do. That’s a big turnoff for me.

So there you have it. I will do this comparison periodically and post the results here.

 

 

 

Aggregator vs Integrator – part 2

I just wanted to give you guys an update on Indeed’s business model that I previously questioned. I indeed had a chat with Indeed’s founder, Rony Kahan, over a cup of coffee earlier today and asked him the question that I posted yesterday. He answered the question with another, ”The way Indeed posts our ads is exactly the way Google does, and it seems work for Google, doesn’t it?” Here is my interpretation: if Google has a valid business model, then Indeed does as well. OK, it makes sense to me now. No, wait, now I am having a problem with Google’s business model .

LAMP or .NET

I don’t want to be geeky, but I do want to go over some technology decisions that we are facing regarding uCareer’s architecture.

For those of you who are not familiar with the term LAMP it stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (sometimes Perl or Python). Personally, since I’ve used C before, PHP seems a natural choice for me, as it’s so easy to learn with a C background. Among the 4S (Speed, Stability, Security and Simplicity), speed and stability are really critical to us (this is not to say that security and simplicity are not). The main reason that I lean towards LAMP is not that all the components are open source and free, but rather they work together seamlessly. The speed of execution is real and does not demand a lot of system resources. Every component integrates well with each other. PHP has a small footprint under Linux and when run as an Apache module, PHP is a thin wrapper around many operating system calls and can be very fast. Our experience is that ASP with MySQL work together well, but PHP and MySQL work faster and as a bonus for me, PHP is so easy to learn with a C background. There is a huge community out there and you can get almost any support and help you need (at least in my case). This is why LAMP is considered an important package in the Internet world.

My biggest concern over any MS product is the support of different versions. This is something that you do not have to worry about with any open source framework. Examples include Amazon and their choice to go with Perl/Mason so that they can extend and fix themselves, Google’s decision to go with Linux and Apache both of which they can modify as they see fit and Oracle’s decision to customize Apache to their own needs. I had a very interesting discussion with Scott Winterton, one of the .NET experts and he had some very good points: 1).Net has an award winning IDE. 2) It is generally safer to go with established languages. 3) When it comes to support, stability and concern for customers’ existing applications, you basically get what you pay for. 4) LAMP in general requires a relatively bigger group of talented engineers, which is why a start up should go with .NET.

Now I am debating again. I will have a meeting with Scott next Monday and we will discuss more on this topic; I will post and update later.

Have you heard this before: “choosing software/application is kind of like choosing a lifestyle, we live different lifestyles depending on what we do. There isn’t one tech that will take over the world.”

Bootstrapping vs Angel money vs VC funding

How you choose to fund your new venture depends on several things: 1) What’s the nature of the venture? 2) How deep are your pockets? 3) What’s your personality?

If you develop something that requires little or no capital and first to market is not your primary concern, like a software company, go bootstrapping for as long as you can. But on the other hand, if the venture needs a large amount money upfront and time is a critical factor to success, I highly recommend VC or angel money. I don’t believe that loosing part of equity should be your biggest concern. I firmly believe that instead of spending time on how to slice the pie, all parties should work together to make the pie bigger. Another reason is that there is fierce competition for talent, especially software engineers, and having deep pockets makes it easier to recruit the best. After all who wants to work for a company that only has two months runway left? Having a good VC as your investor just makes your company more credible. Let’s face it, only one out of 400 business plans presented to VCs actually get funded, so the simple fact that you successfully raised the money from a VC proves that you have a viable business plan. Of course, your personality and experience should be part of the decision as well. Do you have what it takes to work under the pressure to get results or prove your business plan in a relatively short period of time? I’ve learned from my two VC funded experiences that being an entrepreneur is a 24/7 job. Being a VC funded entrepreneur is a 25/8 job. It’s a little bit overwhelming if you don’t have the experience and do not know how to communicate with your VC.

In our case, uCareer is not just looking for investment; we are also looking for partnership. We want a VC or angel (s) that not can only provide financial support, but also the industry expertise we need as well. I am looking forward to talking with the right partners in the Austin area. I’ve already personally invested bootstrapping this project for several months and will continue to do so as long as I can before we team up with the right VC or angel partner.

Starting up

What’s the best way to start a company? In my opinion, the best way to start a business is to find a real problem first and then figure out a way to solve the problem. You then need to find the best technology suitable to fix the problem and then build your team based on the technology needed. So often entrepreneurs start a company with a group of friends or people they know and then look around for a problem. Sometimes they find something they thought was a problem that in reality was not, and then instead of finding the best and most appropriate technology, entrepreneurs choose a technology that they feel comfortable with. In other words, instead of building the team and choosing the technology based on the problem and the best possible solution, entrepreneurs build the team first and then choose the technology that fit the team’s skill set. My good friend and partner Ian Clarke (we founded Thoof together) always likes to say, “If you are a hammer, everything looks like nail to you.” It is especially true when it comes to technology. This is the reason that so many very smart people and promising start-ups fail. Does the customer really need this, or we just thought that they might need this, or worse we think that they do need this.

I started uCareer with one goal in mind, to solve a real problem: too many job sites and too little time. Then, I spent a couple of months talking to experts in this area to find the right technology and approach. Now, I am building a team that has the right skill set for this technology. It’s an easy and natural approach for me, since I am one of those entrepreneurs with the right blend of technology, operation and startup experiences and I am one of those who knows technology well enough to make insightful and very informed decisions, but not well enough to be biased toward or against a specific technology.

Aggregator vs Integrator

I was asked several times in the past couple of days “aren’t there too many sites already out there?” and “how do you differentiate from others?” First, uCareer is not a horizontal player, by that I mean we are not competing with Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs and all other job posting sites, we don’t intend to compete with them horizontally. OK, you say, but even in the vertical sense there are many players out there. True, but all of the vertical players are actually just aggregators.

uCareer is not simply an aggregator, we are an integrator. By that I mean we don’t just search all the jobs out there and put them together in front of our members, rather we use our first in market applications to integrate them together in a way that has never been done before. There are several big aggregators out there: Indeed, Oodle and simplyhired. Personally, I like Indeed best, as they try to deliver more than just a search result (there is really no way to tell whose search result is better, sorry guys), they also try to put targeted ads next to the results, pretty much the way Google Adwords works. Look at the screenshot below. Great idea, just one problem. If, indeed, Indeed works the way they say by providing the best results through the search engine from millions of employment opportunities from thousands of websites, then why should I look at the opportunities presented in the ads, shouldn’t the results be better than those on the side? Really, if the search engine works, why would someone ever want to click the ads? If ads do provide better opportunities, why should job seekers use the search engine in the first place? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Luckily, I will be meeting Indeed’s co-founder Rony Kahan tomorrow and will definitely ask him this question. Hopefully, he can solve this myth for me. I will post his response after talking to him. Stay tuned.

What did I learn from my past experiences?

First and the most important: build something that customers really need, not what you think they might want and build something to make their life easier. Basically, find a need and fill it.

Second, start something that you are passionate about. Don’t start something just because its trendy or everyone else is doing.

Third, great branding and marketing is critical for a consumer site.  How to use viral marketing promotion techniques to penetrate targeted demographics is the key to success for consumer/social network sites.

Another job search site?

Why not? The US online job search market is huge and was worth about $2.4 B in 2007. There are approximately 17 million users who visit various career websites each month. There are approximately 149 million people in the US workforce. Every year approximately 50 million people change their jobs. That means one-third of the entire workforce turns over each year because of new opportunities. The average American worker has had nine jobs by the time he or she is 34 years old because of new opportunities. However, if you look at the top career sites, they haven’t changed much from 10 years ago when I first used those tools. The same old process: employers post jobs and job seekers post their resumes, then employers search resumes and job seekers research positions and submit resume and then wait for an interview. Recruiting is still a very time consuming and sometimes very painful process.

Some companies have been trying to solve the problem from the employers end by attempting to make the process easier and less painful for employers. However, very few resources have been spent on the job-seekers side.

There are several problems for job seekers: 1) Going through multiple sets of interviews answering essentially the same most commonly asked questions. 2) No place to get help before the interview (the basic info of the process and how you compare with other candidates). 3) No feedback after interview (What type of person got the job? Why didn’t I get it? What qualifications did I lack? In what area do I need to improve? etc). 4) No place to share comments/experiences. 5) No central place to manage your career or track multiple career websites.

uCareer is designed to solve these problems and utilize some very popular web2.0 features and applications to make the job searching process less time consuming and less painful for job seekers. We will be the first site using video as a primary communications vehicle for job seekers and employers to communicate with each other. We will leverage our social network platform to help better organize the job search process. There are approximately 16 million college students in the U.S. and about 4 million of them graduate each year. Our main target audience is between 18 to 35 years of age with a special focus on college students and recent graduates. They are tech savvy and willing to challenge the status quo.