People

Entrepreneur Anuvinder Singh Wows Job Seekers

by GEOFF MORGAN

When it comes to the trials and tribulations of people trying to find work, Anuvinder Singh can feel their pain. He's been there before himself, after all.

Anuvinder, the founder and president of Wowjobs, immigrated from Boston after the dot-com crash of the late 1990s. He was using job websites to find work in the tech sector during his first few months in the country.

"You know, you're new to the country and you visit the two obvious job sites and you think, ‘OK, this is the job search here in Canada,'" he says.

But in the five years since he founded Wowjobs, Anuvinder Singh has changed the way Canadian job seekers access job-posting information.

The site has grown into one of the top five sites for job seekers in the country. At any given time, Wowjobs will host 100,000 job posts from 5,000 different job sources. While other job boards charge recruiters for postings, Wowjobs relies on advertising revenue and tries to operate as a Google-like search engine rather than a conventional job-posting board.

"If you are using Google, you are expecting results from the most far-flung and deepest corners of the web and they should be there. That's your expectation," Anuvinder Singh says. "That's the whole idea behind Wowjobs from a candidate's perspective."

Anuvinder and his team at Wowjobs have worked to fine-tune the search engine to actively patrol job postings in Canada and present them to job seekers.

"Can we really find you the job posted by a little company in Yellowknife? They have two job postings; do we have those two jobs?" Anuvinder asks. "Because that could mean the world to someone who is sitting in Halifax and wants to move there and desperately needs that job."

In fact, after Anuvinder Singh arrived in Canada, he moved from the Greater Toronto Area to Edmonton to begin working for the Alberta government recruiting candidates in the IT sector. The experience on the recruiting side helped him round out his business and build a product that would also benefit recruiters. On the job-seeker side, Anuvinder says, job boards are not giving them the whole picture, and on the recruitment side, HR managers need to pay a lot of money just to get a job posting on bigger sites.

But while Anuvinder wants to build a job-search engine akin to Google, he is trying to run his company like the online classified board, Craigslist.

"My personal role model in this has been Craigslist," he says. "They're one of the top-used websites in the world, but they're run with only 16 or 17 people. It's really beautifully managed." And while Anuvinder Singh's company hasn't stolen the job-search market in Canada yet, he says it is comfortably in the top five and has begun expanding into new markets.

Since the company's launch in 2006, Wowjobs has grown out of Canada and into 21 different countries, from South Africa to Singapore. Anuvinder is preparing to launch Wowjobs in Colombia and says one of the most successful new markets where the site is operational is Mexico, which sees 200,000 unique visitors per month.

"I think that's a pretty decent showing for a site that's less than one year old," Anuvinder says.

[Courtesy: Alberta Venture]

May 19, 2011

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