This week on T3 I review the upstart job board with 6+ million customers, ZipRecruiter! Okay, I have to admit, I wasn’t super excited to review ZipRecruiter. I had heard their commercials at least a million times and I thought I knew exactly what they were. Job board for the lower end paying jobs. I was wrong, and what I found, made me a fan!

ZipRecruiter is a job board with a lot of jobs and great marketing engine behind it. You can turn on the radio, TV, or Podcast without listening to one of their commercials. Their sweet spot is SMBs, the majority of their clients are in that space 2-100 employees, but they also are starting to go upstream as well into larger enterprise clients. Zip didn’t set out to cater to lower paying jobs, under $20/hr, but it is something they’re very good at. Zip is built for volume.

Zip is growing like crazy. Over 3 million jobs on their site, with over 60 million job seekers using their site, and over 40 million email subscribers for job alerts. They built a machine that drives applicant flow in a big way, and in a hurry. 48% of the jobs posted on Zip get a qualified candidate submitted in the first hour! 80% within 24 hours!

ZipRecruiter is also working extremely hard to increase the experience for the job seeker in a way that helps both the seeker and the employer with some of their new functionality that lets a job seeker know if when new jobs come on when employers are looking at their profile, etc. Job seekers are taking notice and coming to Zip by the millions.

Things I really like about ZipRecruiter:

– ZipRecruiter is super cheap to use, so you have to be crazy not to test them out and see if they’re right for you.

– Zip makes it super easy through machine learning to let them know if candidates are meeting the quality you expect or not, with a simple ‘thumbs’ up, thumbs down widget where the algorithm will continue to help flush out more candidates that closely fit your liking.

– In the SMB space, if you don’t have an ATS, you can use ZipRecruiter as your ATS pretty easily, and many do this. Zip now has a ton of jobs that are listed nowhere else on the planet because of all of these small employers only listing their openings on Zip.

– “Online Now” is a function within Zip that allows candidates and employers to know who’s currently active online in the system and employers can reach out and “Chat Now” live with candidates. Employers can even do an ‘Instant Interview’ via video with candidates at the moment if they desire using Zip. Also, candidates will see “application viewed” when an employer looks at their application, so candidates know they didn’t fall into a black hole. This helps make Zips users more active than many other sites.

– ZipRecruiter was one of the few original Google for Jobs integration partners so the jobs you post on Zip will show up high in Googles search results.

– Zip offers an exceptional mobile experience for candidates with one-click apply, text message alerts when new jobs are posted in their area, and skill sets.

I was expecting ‘same old job board’ type of stuff when I sat down to demo ZipRecruiter. What I got in return really surprised me! Zip does not want to be a job board of a decade ago, and they are constantly working to add functions for both candidates and employers to make the experience uniquely their own, and one that is extremely valuable to both parties.

It’s free to test ZipRecruiter, and if it works for you it’s very low cost to use it going forward. It’s really a no-brainer to add this to your list of technology in talent acquisition you need to test. The number of employers using and coming back to use it again says all you need to know about the value ZipRecruiter is delivering.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net