The four of us who built ZipRecruiter have been building web startups for going on 15 years now. We embrace the principle of launching the bare minimum feature set and letting customer behavior dictate what you do next.
Launching with “less” sounds easy, but it’s one of the hardest things for a startup to do. You want to wow people. You tell yourself that “one more feature” will be “easy” to include. You compare yourself to established players and think “I can do it better”.
Of course it’s a trap. Until the first customer (who isn’t a friend) uses the site, you have no idea what you should be focusing on.
If you looked at the total time spent building the version of ZipRecruiter we launched in January, the allotment of resources to features was something like this:
- Interview builder + employer view of responses: 80%
- Registration/Subscription process: 15%
- Posting to job boards: 5%
Posting to Job Boards was almost an afterthought. We knew we wanted to do it someday, but the “real value” to employers would be letting employers put the phone screen online for all applicants to take. No more reading through a giant stack of resumes.
After adding the ability to post to job boards we found, to our chagrin, that about 25% of our customers don’t even bother to write an interview at all. To add insult to injury, when we launched our SEM campaign, the best-performing paid advertising headlines all centered around posting to job boards.
Thinking about forming a startup? Smoke test it first. Go to Google adwords and try to summarize your value proposition in a 25 character headline and 52 characters of body text. Run a few variations and see what drives the most clicks. Had we done this before writing a line of code, it’s conceivable we could have shaved months off our development process. Definitely not the most fun way to approach building a startup, but a practical way to vet the all-important question “If I build it, will they come?”
So here we are, fully launched with a rapidly increasing customer base and it’s clear from your usage of our site (and from your articulated feedback) that integration with more job boards is what you want.
And, after a few all-night design/coding/testing sessions, I’m happy to announce that ZipRecruiter now integrates with Indeed, GoogleBase, Oodle, JuJu, Vast, and Trovit.
Our goal going forward is simple. We plan to be the no-doubt-about-it fastest way to get qualified candidates in your inbox. Stay tuned…
