Hiring is tough.
Searching for candidates, wading through piles of resumes, sitting through hours of phone and in person interviews - it’s a job within itself, and for small business owners, almost prohibitively time intensive.
That’s the problem our founders set out to address four years ago when they sat around a kitchen table brainstorming ideas on how to make hiring easier for small businesses, and this is the problem we continue to work hard to solve today.
In the beginning, ZipRecruiter was built as a tool for managing the interview process, by providing employers with access to “deal-breaker” questions that would help weed out unqualified candidates, keeping the pile of incoming resumes slimmer, and the list of interviewees shorter.
Our users loved the deal-breaker quizzes, but they loved our job posting services even more. They told us they wanted access to more job boards, and we listened, honing the product, aggressively simplifying and streamlining in response to the needs of our customers.
Creating Value for SMB’s
In the process we created a polished, well-designed suite of subscription services that provides Fortune 500-level hiring solutions for small to medium sized business, all at a price point that’s affordable for businesses ranging from a mom-and-pop corner store to a regional bank branch.
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That streamlined, affordable approach to best-in-class hiring solutions has resonated strongly with small and medium-sized businesses: over 650,000 employers have posted jobs through ZipRecruiter, with 30,000 new businesses now signing up every month.
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Once businesses sign up with us, they stay - and they stay engaged:
Subscribers stay with us for years
Subscribers post over 600,000 jobs a month
We project 1,000,000 jobs will be posted per month by June
With over 12.6 million posted by the end of the year (three times as many jobs posted as 2014)
A lot of companies would be content to rest on their laurels at this point, to coast along on their momentum, but we went back to our customers and asked them again: “How can we help you?”
Why Onboarding Sucks for Small Businesses
It turns out that the pain of hiring doesn’t end with a job offer. Overwhelmingly, we heard that the onboarding process for businesses without an HR department was a difficult, confusing process.
How do you write a job offer? What paperwork does the Federal government require? Is there an easier way to get documents signed and returned before a new hire’s start date? These are all questions small businesses faced, and they wanted help addressing them.
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We took their feedback and applied our development philosophy to creating a simple, easy-to-use onboarding solution. Where other onboarding services are expensive, overly complex victims of feature creep, we set out to build a service that folks at every level of expertise could use.
How ZipHire Solves Onboarding for SMB’s
That service is ZipHire, our latest product which launched today. ZipHire is a ZipRecruiter product through and through, designed to be fully featured but focused, robust but easy to use.
Key Features Include:
Seamlessly transitions employers from a hiring posture into the on-boarding process
Provides step-by-step, one-click deployment of key hiring documents
New hires can sign paperwork electronically from their phone, tablet, or desktop computer
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By taking away the need for a small business owner to waste time wrangling paperwork (time which could be better spent actually managing their business), ZipHire creates tremendous value for SMB’s. That value is compounded by its price point: it’s free to all ZipRecruiter subscribers.
No other comparable product offers such a rich feature set as a value add, and onboarding is just the first step in the expansion of our core offering. Benefits, payroll, and personnel management are all areas we are exploring in consultation with our customers. Eventually, ZipRecruiter will empower employers to manage their employee lifecycle from job posting to retirement planning, all in one streamlined, easy to use platform.
Why Is This Big News?
The human resources industry is an enormous market. Roughly $62 billion are spent every year on recruiting, Human Capital Management, payroll, benefits, and insurance. That is a huge sum of money, and not a small amount of that spend is due to inefficiencies, overpricing, and lock-in from lack of competition.
Payroll solutions like ADP and Intuit can cost thousands of dollars a month for a medium sized business, and employees can end up costing employers up to 25% more than their salary due to administrative overhead. We look at those numbers and know that we can do better. By simplifying and streamlining personnel management, we can bring prices down for human resources services in the same way that we made job posting affordable for even the smallest business.
And, unlike bigger, legacy companies that rely on lock-in, we are obsessively focused on customer success and support. We will never take our customers for granted. Their entrepreneurial spirit is what inspires us everyday to create value, drive down costs, and give them the tools to grow their business.
This Is Just The Beginning
We’ve spent the entirety of our existence as company in preparation for this moment. In our first phase we focused relentlessly on honing our product, staying lean and profitable, and providing for the hiring needs of SMB’s. Our business approach is data-driven, our product design approach is customer-driven. We know the SMB space like few others.
Our organization has remained efficient as we have scaled. Our marketing efforts, for example, drive 90% of subscription activity through our easy-to-use web interface, with our sales team stepping in to drive the rest.
We have built a base of 650,000 potential customers for our product offerings, a base which is growing by the tens of thousands each month. In this next phase of our business, we are positioned to offer them new products like payroll and health benefits at a scale and efficiency that has not been seen in the space.
We’re still obsessed with how to solve HR for small business, and now is our time to step out front and lead.
