Our Journey - From Smart CVs for Jobseekers to Solving Recruitment Advertising for the AI Age

By Richard Collins, Co-founder

28 August 2024

Trying to build a start up whilst the world changes around you is not an easy thing to do. In fact it's dumb and no one in the right mind should consider doing it. 

However, sometimes the world likes to challenge you and make what is already difficult really tough.

Perhaps being old and grey, with a lifetime of experience in the industry (I had my first online recruitment advertising job in 1995) and having a few successful exits under your belt, should help, but I am not convinced. This is a job for the young and agile I think. We are not planning on doing it again!

When we first set out we had a clear vision, put job seekers at the heart of the process, allow them to prove their skills, and commercialise it by having employers pay to source qualified applicants - we called it CV / Resume Wallet, and we created an App to do just that.

But then along came OpenAI’s ChatGPT, rather inconveniently mid way through our build and it changed everything….

Much head scratching ensued. We felt that we were absolutely in the right place to ride the wave, but perhaps we needed a different sort of boat. 

Rather than join the crowd and build lots of AI apps that would immediately become out of date as the technology rapidly evolved, instead, we would focus on solving the issues that we thought would follow as a result of the changes we foresaw.

Luckily we seem to have predicted a few things correctly (being old helps with this one!), including…

1. Jobseekers would adopt AI rapidly

2. New tools would be launched that made Easy apply look focused

3. Trust in the application process would drop

4. Employers would be increasingly overwhelmed with unsuitable applicants

We realised that the technology that we had already built went some way towards helping solve many of these problems and if we expanded our tools beyond just proving skills then we could have something very exciting…we just didn't know what exactly that would be.

We also realised we needed to pivot with our commercial model (and I hate a pivot). Too many applicants would mean less demand for sourcing, so more screening of applicants from advertising was the way to go.

So we quickly shifted focus and the team started developing new tech to solve the problems that we had identified (At this point we are 2 and a half years in, with a team of 10 people - so that's a lot of code!).

In April, we went live with a MVP for the first time, and it was wildly successful (we went from Zero to $2mill AR in a week!)….too successful in fact, and the wheels pretty much fell off soon after - turns out our partners wanted all sorts of supporting infrastructure including analytics dashboards etc (imagine that!) which we hadn't even thought about yet.

So we turned everything right down to testing levels and did some more development to create a cutting edge infrastructure for them.

We then put all the tech we had created together into a single platform (including the jobseeker app that continues to play a key part) and stood back to admire our work and tried to figure out what the hell we had actually built. 

Note to any aspiring entrepreneurs……This is no way to build a business. DO NOT COPY!!

Drum roll please….

By putting everything together we realised we had built a groundbreaking platform that would enable both Advertisers and Publishers to get closer to the hire, delivering more qualified applicants to employers (via their agencies and programmatic tech), and maximising revenue for job boards and other publishers.

We labelled it as a next generation marketplace for recruitment advertising. So like the stock exchange, but for jobs. But with a particularly focused on the supply side, we feel that the world is well catered for with some great demand side programmatics already, and doesn't need another. 

We also needed a new brand, CV / Resume Wallet is great for the app and we will keep that for jobseekers, but it is not so good for a global B2B brand, so we are going to use C Squared instead (which was our legal entity name and why reinvent the wheel).

And a new strap-line…

seemed appropriate. This is Beverly’s world of strategic marketing, so I just nod along sagely, but it works on many levels and just gets smarter the more you reflect on it. 

As for the go to market product, we realised after our initial go live and having analysed all the data, that not all jobs are created equal. Some were great, but some were in fact worse than terrible (low conversion rates, low CPAs, undesirable employers etc). 

So we invented Exchange Traded Feeds (ETFs), where we grouped only the best jobs that share similar characteristics together (such as high performing employers, best conversion rates, specific Industry sectors, best paying, certain Job types etc) into specialised, curated XML feeds.

This would allow Job boards and other publishers, by picking the right ETFs for their audience, to commercialise their sites much more effectively. (Increasing revenue by up to 600% vs benchmark in some cases).

Through these ETFs we realised we could also solve another age old industry problem, how to commercialise a cost per qualified application model. Moving the advertising industry closer to the hire, away from unsuitable, low value clicks to high quality, high value, verified applicants who are qualified for the job, creating exciting new revenue opportunities for our publishers and Ad Agencies alike. Helping shifting the $35bill a year advertising industry into the $350bill recruitment one. This is why we talk about the platform as being a “Next Generation” Job AdExchange.

It all works beautifully now, (after a seemingly endless amount of ‘ Whack a mole’ bashing of problems along the way) and we have already raced past our original go live in terms of revenue generation even though we haven't officially launched it yet, and it's August!

We are very fortunate that through our experience from ClickIQ, we know some amazing people within the industry, and they have provided us with huge amounts of support during this process. As a result we have been lucky enough to have already been able to partner with several of the worlds biggest Ad Agencies and Programmatics, giving us millions of jobs from hundreds of blue chip employers, as well as over 20 of the leading job boards, with their jobseeker audiences.

Bringing these 2 sides together has allowed us to immediately create a very busy and vibrant marketplace that is growing like crazy.

The next stage for us is to start telling the world about what we are doing, this blog I guess is the first part of that. Unlike with ClickIQ, we believe we can grow faster by working through partners rather than directly with employers, so at least we aren't having to spend days on end standing at Expos’ selling to anyone who will listen. Whilst continuing to build and deliver world class technology for our partners.

We think what we have is unique and has the potential to help the recruitment advertising industry not only to survive the changes that are being seen in the market, both competitively and from AI, but to thrive. 

The death of job boards has long been predicted, and more recently commentators have also added Ad Agencies to the future endangered list as a result of behaviour from the “job board that shall not be named”, but I think the opposite is true and we are about to see them both reborn and reinvented into a competitive force for a new golden age. 

Our mission through C Squared is to help make that happen.

To find out more go have a look at our website: www.CSquaredAdExchange.com