The kitchen table where ZipRecruiter was born
I’m excited to share an important milestone.
After more than 10 years of hard work, the business my co-founders and I started around a kitchen table is now a publicly traded company (NYSE: ZIP)!
I am deeply grateful for the dedication and ingenuity of our ZipRecruiter team, and for the trust of millions of job seekers and employers who have relied on us to help them reach key milestones on their own journeys.
Our Mission
At ZipRecruiter, our mission is to actively connect people to their next great opportunity. Great is a very high bar, but the audacity to strive for greatness is what I love about this job and this company. What we do here matters—we are helping job seekers and companies build their futures.
The Idea for ZipRecruiter
Before co-founding ZipRecruiter, I worked for a string of start-ups that were too small to have HR departments do my recruiting for me. I was the one personally posting jobs to multiple job boards. The amount of time it took was stunning. It was while staring at multiple stacks of printed resumes on my desk that the idea for ZipRecruiter came to me. “What if there was a button you could push that would send a job to every job site at once! Even better, what if all the applicants from all sites were stored in one place for review.” Two years later, that is exactly what my co-founders and I built. ZipRecruiter was born.
When we launched in 2010, I was incredibly proud of our business. We deployed a solution that greatly simplified the recruiting process. Employers were getting better outcomes and signing up in droves. The company was receiving accolades for innovation, and I felt like we had already made a meaningful impact on the world. Hiring, which no one enjoyed doing, had suddenly become easier.
But a couple of years in, something that had been percolating below the surface became too big a problem to ignore.
Transforming Job Search—for Everyone
As much as we had positively transformed the recruiting process for hiring managers—the job seekers we spoke to still hated searching for work. Job seekers didn’t know which job sites to search on, which jobs to apply to, and worst of all, why they would send out countless applications and hear nothing back. Finding a job is an emotionally draining process and the words most frequently used by job seekers I talked to were “frustrated” and “confused.”
My co-founders and I made a decision. Just as we had for employers, we were going to build a product that made job search easy.
Eight years later, with hundreds of dedicated full-time engineers working on the problem, and a series of first-of-their-kind features deployed, I am proud to say that ZipRecruiter has been the top rated mobile job search app on iOS and Android for the last four years.1 Along the way, we had to become experts not just on the technology, but the psychology of job search.
Building a better job site meant finding solutions for non-intuitive realities around things like how job seekers self-disqualify from jobs they should apply to, what recruiters really do with your resume, and how speed in everything (applying to a job, responding to an employer’s email, or answering your phone) can matter as much to you getting hired as your professional experience.
We had to confront the fact that something as simple as your resume format has a major effect on whether you get an interview, and the uncomfortable truth that employers struggle to describe who they will actually hire in a job description.
Of course, technology plays a big part. Today, we are aiming to replace tedious “job search” altogether by training AI to play the role of active matchmaker. The software we have built leverages billions of interactions between job seekers and employers to drive insights that find people jobs they love. Every day we work to make our data better, and then we find even smarter ways to apply those insights to make our next Great Match. And then we do it again, and again, and again…making a Great Match every second. We have conviction that technology driving connections is the future of the job category.
We Are Just Getting Started
My kids should not have to be as lucky as I was to find a job that I love. Neither should your kids. That is our ambition at ZipRecruiter: to use technology to make things simpler. To make sure neither side of the job market misses a potential Great Match.
We do this because we believe jobs are fundamental. They give people a sense of purpose and identity. They can change the trajectories of people’s lives. We have built a team that is obsessed with helping people. We will not stop until we make finding talent and finding jobs easy. Our marketplace makes the online experience personal, and dare I say, even fun.
As the economy reopens, ZipRecruiter will be there to help put America back to work and accelerate the recovery. I invite you to join us on our journey.
Congratulations to the entire ZipRecruiter team on a big day. This is an amazing milestone, and it’s only the beginning.
Onwards!
Ian
1Based on ratings information for the Google Play Store and Apple App Store from the AppFollow platform during the period of March 2017 to March 2021 for the job seeker apps of ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, Craigslist, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster.
