CareerBuilder CTO: Eric Presley

Dan Farber: Eric thanks for joining me.

Eric Presley: Thanks for having me Dan.

Dan Farber: CareerBuilder.com has been around for many years. It is in a very competitive space but give me a little bit on the size and scope of your operation.

Eric: Sure. CareerBuilder has over 24 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. We have over a million jobs posted on a monthly basis. We have over 28 million resumes on our site.

Dan Farber: Now that's pretty incredible; a million jobs on a monthly basis. Obviously, you have lots of competition, what are you doing to stay ahead of your competition?

Eric Presley: Well, at CareerBuilder we really invest in our technology. We believe our search technology and our recommendation engine technology are real market leaders that really help jobseekers be efficient in their process of looking for jobs. We're looking deep within the behavior of the keywords people use and try to understand their intentions. We're trying to apply those things to make sure we are giving back, not only the most relevant, but also the highest number of jobs.

Dan Farber: So you we're talking about search and recommendation, what about those technologies that make them more capable than competitors?

Eric Presley: Well, one of the things that we really focus on is how people want to look for a job. They don't want to spend a lot of time filling out detail forms for 20-30 minutes. They expect to do just a basic keyword search, look at geography and have the search engine in a way read your resume and provide back relevant jobs. We've really invested in that technology and also the ability to show recommended jobs based on someone's resume that they already have.

Dan Farber: We've talked a little about search and recommendation, what are some of the other product developments that you can cite over the years that have been a kind of innovation breakthrough?

Eric Presley: Well, one of the areas, especially the last one to two years, we've been really focused on is CareerBuilder's international expansion. We've been expanding into Europe, acquired a few companies and are now supporting of 14 different countries all in one platform with over 14 languages. The technology to be efficient in search and being an efficient search in multiple languages on the same platform has really been our focus.

Dan Farber: What are some of the other areas where you've seen some dramatic improvement in the time spent on or in pages because of the way you built the site?

Eric Presley: One of the things that is a little bit different about us is that we don't measure success based on time spent on site or page views. What we are focused on is our core metric, which is the number of job applications that each unique visitor does on our site. That's the metric that we look toward. We're not really focused on the number of number of page views.

Dan Farber: One of the other areas we haven't discussed at this point is social networking. I know if you've got a site with 24 million people and 20 some million resumes, it seems like it would be right for social networking.

Eric Presley: For social networking, CareerBuilder has a partnership with Facebook. We're opening up avenues for our employers to be able to reach into the vast Facebook audience. In addition to that CareerBuilder has developed our own niche networking site called Brightfuse.com. That's a place we're really just learning about how jobseekers interact with each other and how they might support themselves in a community kind of way in terms of developing your career.

Dan Farber: How much are you using mobile technologies, like RSS and other techniques, as a way to reach the jobseekers or even the employers without having come to the website?

Eric Presley: We've experimented with mobile technology for several years. Right now we are not doing a huge amount in that area. Except, we did recently, with the launch of the iPhone and the iPhone Apps Store, participate in and are providing a job search service through the iPhone. We do provide job alerts directly via SMS to mobile phones but it's something that we're, especially as we're doing more overseas work, really looking to see how we can learn what's happening overseas and where the U.S. is going to go with mobile.

Dan Farber: Eric, thanks for speaking with me.

Eric Presley: Thanks for having me Dan.

Dan Farber: I have been speaking with Eric Presley, the CTO of CareerBuilder.com. For CIO sessions I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching.