Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster (Part 4)

Friday, July 13, 2007 | 3 comments

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? PF: We’ve built an extremely talented team across the board – from developers to sales executives. A large proportion found their jobs through Indeed itself, which is gratifying. We’re continuing to build the team and our current open positions are listed here: http://www.indeed.jobs/

SM: What are your thoughts about exit? Since we have an unresolved question around TAM, I would have to conclude that if your TAM is relatively small, then you will need to exit before you raise another round of money. If, however, you want to raise more money, then you will need to rationalize the market size question. PF: We are focused on moving the company forward: building the team, improving our services, growing revenue and ultimately generating profits for our
shareholders. For now, we have enough cash to keep going.

SM: What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far? PF: The most important thing has been to maintain the focus on serving the interests of our users – in our case, job seekers. It’s the guiding philosophy of the company and one of the things that differentiates Indeed – as a search engine for jobs – from other online recruiting services. Our goal is to be the best starting point for job search on the web; the most comprehensive and relevant search engine for jobs.

SM: My thesis is that the next iteration of the Online Jobs industry needs to take a career management approach, as opposed to Job Search, and use extensive personalization to achieve such a user experience. Thoughts? PF: I think job search will always be absolutely central to career management, but there’s still a lot of scope for related services as you say. We’ve made steps in that direction with our Job Trends, Salary Search and Forums. Our alerts and RSS feeds are also a way for people to monitor jobs in their fields somewhat passively. We’ll be doing a lot more in the future – anything that helps people in their careers is something we should consider.

SM: Readers who have been following the Online Jobs industry overview know that much of what’s available through online job boards is junior / middle management jobs. I have discussed the above issue in somewhat detail in my reviews of the Job Boards, Monster, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder. Ultimately, a vertical search engine will need to belong inside a larger Web 3.0 offering that includes Content, Commerce, Community, as well as Context-sensitive Vertical Search and Personalization. This conversation with Paul has been an interesting close-up view of one of the key components of a successful Web 3.0 implementation: Vertical Search, in the Context of Jobs. Hope you enjoyed it!