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.