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Although it’s a very niche solution, SeeMore addresses a very typical big-data problem: finding the needle in the haystack of unstructured data. Resumes and other job-application materials aren’t easily broken down into information that would fit nicely into a relational database, so searching through them to find relevant information requires lots of man-hours or specialized tools. Something like Hadoop might be overkill, but SeeMore seems to fit the bill.

Especially now, with unemployment rates higher than at any time in recent history, employers are seeing lots of applicants for every job they post, on top of the unsolicited resumes they no doubt receive. With so many choices, it’s very likely that the ideal candidate has sent in a resume, but it’s also that much easier to miss that resume.

SeeMore actually takes it a step further by centralizing all of a company’s resumes in the cloud, meaning companies might be able to fill an opening with the ideal candidate, even if that person only applied for a different job and via an entirely different channel. Semantic search is key to the process, because employers can search based on broad skill sets instead of just keywords, and the system applies context to the information included on the resumes in order to pull the right ones.

A quote included in the press release sums up Monster’s new service nicely:

‘With the introduction of SeeMore, we are transforming recruitment and talent management by taking our state-of-the-art 6Sense semantic search and applying it to resumes beyond Monster,’ said Sal Iannuzzi, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Monster Worldwide. ‘Employers can now assess their company’s talent databases in one central location so everyone can be found easily, regardless of their point of origin. This, paired with the benefits of semantic search and analytics, enables companies to be more precise about their talent matching needs, reduce the time and cost of acquiring and managing talent, and improve the quality of hires.’

However, while SeeMore is great for Monster and its customers, it signals what should be a broader trend toward merging big data and cloud computing. The cloud makes it easier than ever for companies to consume niche services, and easier for providers with those niche skills to deliver that service. Data just happens to be a great focal point for a service that everyone now has mountains of and is starting to realize is actually valuable. Helping companies make the most of their data in a particular area, or even giving them access to your data in that field, is becoming a great way to drum up new business.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Brooks Elliott

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Raveal is aimed at the job hunter, promising to represent those who list themselves with the service as people, not assets. It’s an attractive prospect when you’re coming from a situation where you feel significantly less than human in the meat market that is Monster. And it has a distinctly simple, clean Web 2.0 look that at least shows the site’s designers take their job seriously.

Once I got into the process of actually creating a profile, though, I began to wonder if the look and feel of the site were the only things that distinguished it from its predecessors. The information asked for when setting up your public profile is suspiciously similar to the information you’d be asked for on Workopolis or any similar site. I suppose the basic search criteria that employers will use doesn’t vary that much, so maybe Raveal using it can be excused. Still, for a modern Web 2.0 app, I found the categories provided to be pretty traditional and restrictive.

Raveal’s resume creator is a little more free-form. The standard “Objective,” “Experience” and “Education” fields are all there (although you can customize even these basic section titles), but you can also add as many additional custom categories as you want. Each section has entries within it, which consist of a title and a description or details. It’s a very simple format, but it does allow for considerable customization.

Finally, the “Portfolio” section offers what is perhaps Raveal’s most important distinguishing feature. In it, you can write a brief bio for yourself (or, optionally, use your resume objective), and then add “Galleries” to fill it out. For each gallery you can set a title and decide whether or not it is publicly viewable, and you can add as many items as you want, up to your storage limit (100 MB on free accounts, 1 GB for Pro users). File types supported include images, videos, audio, and Flash files, and also entire web sites, so long as there is an index.html file and your internal links are relative. This could be very handy for web designers who have templates or designs not hosted elsewhere.

Raveal’s Portfolio feature saves it from becoming yet another Workopolis or Monster. It gives you a visually rich way to present your work to prospective clients, without having to link them off to a bunch of different locations. So far, I don’t see any reason to jump to a paid subscription just yet, but this is an early release, so we’ll see what Raveal brings to the table in future iterations.

Share your online job search experiences in the comments.

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That’s what Michel did just six months before selling his latest startup, Affinity Labs, to Monster.com for $61 million in January. Michel gave up a tidy bit of his own windfall, but he has no regrets, and thinks more founders should follow suit.

F|R: You gave half a percent of your personal stake in Affinity Labs to three senior managers shortly before selling the company. Why?

Chris Michel: One key to success is having a very small and overqualified team. We all know this, but forget that the best people could also go and be CEOs at their own companies. In a “war for talent” you have ask yourself: What wouldn’t you do to bring the right people onto your team and keep them in the game? Rarely is compensation enough to make anyone happy. First, people want to be at a place that they’re proud of, surrounded by people who are as talented or more talented than they are, working on problems that matter. Second, they want to be [remuneratively] valued. Compensation is a necessary, though not sufficient, tool. But you can’t screw up the comp stuff because it’s the easiest thing to do right.

F|R: What is the right amount of equity to give away? Why not give senior mangers larger stakes up front?

Michel: Boards tend to be very cautious with compensation, and its unusual to increase someone’s equity unless there is a promotion or a retention issue. Typically VPs of early-stage companies get between 1 percent and 1.7 percent of a company. That’s just the benchmark, but it’s what investors will expect to see. The equity structure of a VC-backed company looks like this: The investors own 40 percent; the founder(s) own 40 percent; 20 percent is set aside in an employee option pool. After a round of additional funding, your senior managers may each be diluted from 1.5 percent to 0.75 percent. If you sell the company for $100 million — a very good outcome for a startup — the managers each get $750,000. If you toiled away for five years to build the company, is that worth giving up five years of a great salary? Maybe not.

F|R: How did you do it and convince your board to go along?

Michel: A request to give an unscheduled grant to people can cause heartache, because there is a perception that it depletes the option pool for future recruiting. But I went to my board and said: “Here, I’ll take 0.5 percent of my equity and 0.5 percent from the option pool.” They saw that I was taking it very seriously, that it was impacting me, and went along. We gave 1 percent to three senior managers, who each got 0.33 percent in addition to what they previously held. The lawyers had never seen anyone do that before. It turned out to be a little complicated, because you don’t want to create tax consequences for people, but that’s what the lawyers are for. The board was surprised, but it precipitated a philosophy at Affinity to proactively take care of our team.

F|R: How did your managers respond?

Michel: No one said anything in particular, other than “Thanks,” though I’m not sure they would. It certainly made me sleep better at night. But the psychological benefit to giving people equity might even be more important that the actual value. When people are serious owners of the companies they work for, they work harder. This wasn’t just altruistic. It was a smart business move.

Affiinity CFO, Curtis Atkisson, a recipient of the grant, responds:
I felt like I was being thought of as a “cofounder” of the businesses. That recognition is as important as the ownership grant…it has extended my commitment to grow the business post-acquisition. [It] has engendered loyalty.

F|R: How much did this actually cost you personally?

Michel: Maybe $350,000. It isn’t that I was super generous, my point is that you can very easily give away some of your ownership and it won’t affect you very much. It is the statement that matters. Over and over I see founders who are parsimonious with their equity, and there is good reason for this. But most startups die. If you run the calculation on the net represent value of the equity, this is the cheapest thing you can do to lock in good people. If your company is a “big win,” you’re going to make a lot of money anyway. If not, no one vests. There is no downside. It just makes sense for even the most self-interested founder to be very generous with their team. Net-net, perhaps those 1 percent benchmarks need to be fundamentally reconsidered.

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The piece outlines why the Silver brothers abandoned managing “activities” through their org chart hierarchy, in favor of a flat, employee-empowered strategy that they’ve dubbed, “managing by objectives.”

This is the second time Found|READ has addressed the virtue of weighing Outcomes vs. Activity. It is a subtle discipline, but based on how it helped Printable, you might want to try it, too. As Scott tells Crain, it works because: “Sales feed egos. Margins feed families.” (Just look how happy his staff is!)

According to Crain, in Printable’s early days, when closing sales mattered most (as it does at all startups) Silver’s 15 employees were reviewed based on activities like “did [you] call all these customers to follow up on the fact that they owe us money?”

Notice: the criterion was ‘did you follow up,’ NOT ‘did you get the money!’ Sales are an activity. The margin is the ultimate result of the activity.

Scott tells Crain that managing activities this way

“[created] a lot of internal inefficiencies, with all sorts of back and forth. If there was a problem, sales would look into it, then production, then I would, then it was back to accounting for a discount or to fix it some way… once we started to reach critical mass, there weren’t enough hours in the day for us to be part of it.”

So in 2006 the brothers switched strategies to focus on the results of the activity, not the activity itself.

For example, instead of “following up” the goal became: “I will acquire five new clients” or “I will keep my profit margin at a certain level.” Or, for the non-sales people, something like, “I will collect 85% of our receivables within 60 days.”

Then, to alleviate management’s need to oversee everything…

…the Silvers empowered their staff to make decisions, as long as they could answer ‘Yes’ to 5 questions:
1) Is it right for the customer?
2) Is it right for our company?
3) Is it ethical?
*4) Is it something for which you are willing to be accountable?
5) Is it consistent with our company’s basic beliefs?

We emphasize #4, because we think is the most important: Printable’s employees now set their own goals, and it’s up to them to figure out how to reach them. This includes personal goals, like quitting smoking. Why?

“It’s more about principles than tactics,” said Scott. “The idea is goal-setting is for your whole life, making you a more complete person,” Scott emphasized.

A more complete person is a more complete team member. This is how focusing on results, rather than activity, has transformed the Silvers’ business. According to Scott: “[We used to have] 50% of sales people meeting their goals. This quarter, I think everyone is going to hit them.”

For more on why results matter more than activity, read Chris Michel’s earlier Found|READ post:Outcomes vs. Activity. Chris knows a lot about this. He founded an early social networking site, Military.com in 1999, sold it to Monster.com in 2004 for $40 million, then founded Affinity Labs, which he sold to Monster for even more — $61 million — earlier this month. Talk about outcomes. Congratulations, Chris!

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*How do I deal with board member whose priorities seem to be diverging from mine and my co-founder’s at a critical time in the startup’s life?*

My co-founder and I have our hands full dealing with things like a) a product upgrade and b) a big sales push to get us over the hump. It’s a critical time for the business, and we’re pusing our team really hard. We’re confident that this will work, but we have a particularly difficult board member who doesn’t seem to share our attitude.

We’re not sure why, but nothing seems sufficient to meet his expectations for revenue (some of which I feel may be unreasonable for a young startup). We hear the word “results” a lot. I am beginning to fear that his attitude might have more to do with his own investment portfolio (need for an exit?), and less to do with our company. More pressing: we worry that his attitude, or lack of patience, will taint others on our board — insecurity breeds insecurity, and after a certain point, I’ve observed that many investors will opt for unloading a startup that represents a troublesome situation. (Ditto for a founder who represents same.)

The director is a well-connected investor, so we can’t afford to alientate him, or anyone else. And I figure if we go head-to-head with him we’ll lose. (Money talks.) So short of fostering more confrontation/conflict before the board, what can we do? The more time we spend assuaging his concerns, the less time we have for the real work.

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