Careersaas: Find Your Next Career

We talked to Alex Goodchild, founder of Careersaas, about career development and this is what he said about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Alex Goodchild: My family and I are well – we are currently in the middle of a lockdown which means I’ve had extra time to focus on my job and my side project on the weekends. The pandemic has given me the opportunity and free time to learn new technologies.

Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded Careersaas.

Alex Goodchild: I’m currently working for a large cloud software and database company, which occupies most of my time during the week. In the past, I’ve been exposed to search and scraping technologies at the largest media monitoring company in the world. At both of the companies that I’ve worked for during my professional career, I’ve been responsible for regional or global software development teams. 

The idea for Careersaas came about a couple of years ago. My friend, co-founder, and recruiter by trade, Nik, came to me in late 2019 asking if I could write a quick scraper to extract jobs from a website. We slowly grew this portfolio of scrapers to include a few other websites and started to build out an early database hosting a couple of thousand jobs. 

After a couple of weeks, we had further conversations around how we could extend this scraping idea to scale out to thousands of job boards and corporate websites. I presented an idea to him that I would like to build a platform that would not just have a powerful search engine, but also an all-encompassing Career platform that could easily tie careers to jobs – a missing piece of the jigsaw for job search on the internet today.

I had started to build out some basic proof of concepts for the UI and the search engine, and very quickly we realized that there was a business opportunity – nobody had taken on LinkedIn in the area of Remote jobs – a huge gap in the market, particularly as the world of work had changed so much during the COVID-19 pandemic. We started to reposition our proof of concepts to focus on Remote Work and Internships. 

How does Careersaas innovate? 

Alex Goodchild: We actively encourage our users to provide feedback to us. We’ve done this with a series of A/B tests for smaller audiences, but having direct contact with the recruitment industry helps; as we’re often in contact with job-seeking candidates who have some time to use our platform.  

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Alex Goodchild: As we’ve just launched, we’re cautious of our business finances and have taken steps to evaluate other cloud providers as this is our largest cost today. 

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources and what are the lessons learned?

Alex Goodchild: We’ve had to make difficult choices here. One thing that we have learned is that the people that you bring on board early on the need to be fully committed if they are to help you succeed in growing a startup. It’s important to try and find people who have some startup experience or have worked in the software space.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Alex Goodchild: Today, we use Zendesk and under the hood, we have built our own CRM tool to manage the customer lifecycle. As we have a database of close to 1 million companies, we’ve adapted that to our CRM tool and can find leads from the data that we’ve scraped from the Internet.

Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?

Alex Goodchild: We did not apply for any government grants during this time.

Your final thoughts?

Alex Goodchild: COVID-19 has been a tricky time for millions of us all over the globe, and for those that have lost or are worried about their job, I believe that there is a world of opportunity and thousands of remote jobs that you may be eligible for, regardless of what country you’re in. Shameless plug – we’ve more remote jobs than any other website on the internet – so go and take a look at what’s out there and available!

Your website?

Corporate website

Careersaas portal