INTERVIEW: Roberto Angulo, CEO, Recruitology

For the third consecutive year, Miami Beach was the backdrop to yet another successful Global Online Marketplaces Summit. 

Over 230 attendees from around the world took part in three information and networking-packed days, among them Recruitology's CEO, Roberto Angulo, with whom we had the pleasure of conversing.

ONLINE MARKETPLACES:  What do you see as your biggest challenge(s) in the emerging race to the transaction model?

ROBERTO ANGULO: In our space, we’re constantly striving to get closer to the customer, in this case, employers looking to hire the right candidates. The goal is not only to get more transactions, but to create ongoing engagement so that employers come back every time they need to hire someone.

Recruitology works via reseller partners -- over 400 of them. We partner with local media outlets such as newspapers and TV stations who resell Recruitology’s recruitment products, as their own, to local employers. Examples of our media partners are the Miami Herald and the The Seattle Times. An employer traditionally would think of the newspaper as a place to post a print ad. Maybe an online ad. We’re working hand-in-hand with partners like The Seattle Times and Miami Herald so they are positioned as the one-stop shop where employers can post not only to their job site, but to many other top brands as well such as Indeed, Glassdoor, Facebook, Google, and to over 120 niche job sites. Click here for an example of how an employer would post via the Seattle Times.

So, we have two goals:

The first is to help position our media partners as the place to go to find talent for local employers. This is working, and in a given year, we’ll get about 36,000 employers posting jobs through Recruitology via our media partners.

The second goal is to get these employers to keep coming back and doing more, such as posting jobs, searching for candidates, and ultimately managing their hiring process.

OM: What new, or innovative products, methods or processes are you or your company implementing?

ROBETO ANGULO: Our goal is to help our reseller partners be the one-stop recruitment solution in their market(s). This means we have to keep innovating and adding new products in order to truly be a one-stop shop where employers want to go. One of the first things we launched was programmatic job advertising. By posting a job via one of our media resellers, employers not only get their job on the local partner’s job board, which Recruitology powers, but also get their job automatically distributed to other top job boards that accept cost-per-click bidding. We call this product MaxRecruit.

We’ve seen employers embrace this product to post their jobs and we’ve seen job posting volume and revenue grow. This is the first step I mentioned before. The second step is to create more employer engagement. We’ve started doing this by launching an applicant tracking system (ATS) for employers who don’t have one and advertise jobs via our reseller partners. The ATS is free to employers who post via our partners. It’s a way for the employer to manage candidates and to also see how applicants rank in terms of relevance. Soon we’ll launch a candidate matching product that pulls resumes from other sources and presents the matches to the employer.

OM: If you had to pick two things, what would be your two takeaways from the conference?

ROBERTO ANGULO: I see many attendees at the conference from LATAM and Europe. One takeaway for me would be to connect with peers in other regions with the hope of expanding our offering to LATAM and Europe, for example. The second takeaway would be to share best practices with others in the industry.

OM: What do you see as the biggest, or most pressing issue in the jobs portal world now?

ROBERTO ANGULO: I think the most pressing issue is relevance. How do you maintain and grow your relevance in a world where two players mainly, Facebook and Google, control most of the online advertising market. In our case, we’re showing relevance by connecting to Facebook and Google for example, and letting employers post to these sites. In addition, we’re letting them post to 150+ additional relevant job boards that have unique audiences. We’re also working to be proactive and match candidates to employers’ jobs. We recently launched an applicant tracking system too. These are some of the things we’re doing to add value to the customer/employer in order to add more value and be relevant.

OM: Is there anything that your company is doing now, or has done, which you believe sets you apart from other jobs portals or competitors in your market?

ROBERTO ANGULO: Yes. On one hand, what we’re doing is not new, but the way we’re doing it is new and sets us apart.

The idea of aggregating services or distributing jobs has been around for over a decade. Indeed was the first to start aggregating jobs from other job boards into one job board. There are also job distribution services out there that have been operating for years. But we’ve done a few things differently.

First of all, we’re not looking to create a job seeker brand for Recruitology. We’re strictly focused on the employer side of the marketplace and serving employers via reseller partners, under their own brand. Our goal is to be the point through which small and medium (SMB) employers feel they can fulfil all their recruitment needs.

Secondly, we’re sending applicants from the 150+ job boards and sites to which we distribute jobs, to the employers. We’re transparent about where the applicants come from. They don’t come from Recruitology, they come from one of the job boards to which we distributed the job. Employers and reseller partners appreciate this transparency when we share stats with them.

OM: What is the one thing that you would have done differently when you started in your role at your company, knowing what you know now? 

ROBERTO ANGULO: We started Recruitology just over three years ago. One of the lessons I learned from the previous service I started, AfterCollege, is that it’s harder to grow a two-sided marketplace compared to a one-sided one. AfterCollege is a two sided marketplace connecting college students and grads on one side, with employers on the other side. You constantly need to balance the needs of both sides. With Recruitology, we are focused only on the employer. We rely on our job board partners to focus on serving their job seeker audiences.

The learning lesson is to focus as much as you can on as little as possible and be really good at it. This is what we’re doing at Recruitology. I am lucky to work with a team at Recruitology that is passionate and knows their field.

OM: What other portals, besides your own, or people, or companies, do you see as innovators/leaders in their field, and why?

ROBERTO ANGULO: I am a big fan of Airbnb. This is another two-sided marketplace, but in a different space. I’m both a host and a traveler on their platform, and I like how they came into a space that already had dominant players and innovated by doing things better and doing more. They added a level of trust that didn’t exist before, with their reviews. As a guest, you are motivated to leave a review because you want to see the hosts’ review of you as a guest. They also took the risk away for hosts by adding insurance. Airbnb has innovated, but also optimized to make the little things better and easier to use. Their messaging platform works on SMS, email and via the Airbnb app. They’ve made the communication between guest and host more reliable.

At Recruitology, we look to emulate this sort of innovation and optimization. We innovate by coming up with new products, but we also work to make sure the products we have work well, and we work to constantly improve them.

Join us in Madrid, November 12-15 for the Global Online Marketplaces Summit.