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.