Chris Forman is the CEO and Founder of StartWire: free job search organizer. Our primary feature and what people really enjoy about using StartWire is that in addition to giving you some really simple and easy to use tools to track all your applications and get recommendations during your job search, we provide you with automatic updates on your job application from 5,000+ employers. If you talk to job seekers about the job application process, you’ll find out that besides not having a job, the thing that they dislike most about the job application process is not hearing back from employers and Startwire takes the pain out of that equation.
Do you think the education you’ve invested in helped you on the road to success?
It’s been about 20 years since I was in school, and what I can say is that the knowledge, what was actually in the books and on the tests when I went to university has no bearing whatsoever around what I do every day, but the methodology, and the discipline and understanding how to write and how to think critically are all things I use every day and I can’t imagine being where I am today without the education that I got from a nifty little school, small school in Maine called Colby College, which by the way, just for the record, is a significantly better school than Bates and Bowdoin, which are also small schools in Maine.
What was the “break point” or an AHA moment in your career that made you decide to start what you’re currently doing & how did you come up with that Idea?
I don’t think there was any AHA moment or break point. I’m sitting right next to the other founder of StartWire, his name is Tim McKegney. He and I both built a business together which we grew to 16 employees, 11-12 million dollars in revenue and we sold it, and that business was, for a lack of a better analogy, Salesforce.com for corporate recruiters, people who work at companies whose job is to recruit talent and we enjoyed building that business, we enjoyed working with the company that acquired our company to insure it was a successful acquisition but when we were done with that both of us still had a lot of gas in the tank and we wanted to go and get back into the world of startups and try build something from scratch. Good businesses are built on a distinct and measurable pain-point. You pay someone to have your garbage taken away because you don’t want to take the garbage to the dump yourself; you pay somebody to have your lawn cut because you don’t want to spent two hours on a beautiful Saturday cutting your own lawn; you pay somebody to do your taxes for you because you can’t do them or it’s painful to do them. When we were looking at building StartWire we wanted to find a pain that was strong and emotional and something that we could really build a solution around the people who identified with and from years of experience building software applications for recruiting departments at big companies we interacted with millions of job seekers because those are the folks that would be in the databases and software that we built and we got to know the problems that they had and challenges that they were looking at and this particular issue just materialized from a lot of experience.
As a young professional, what were some of the mistakes that you made and what did you learn?
The key mistake we made while building a business (Startwire) was that we knew what the primary pain-point of our target market was, which is applying for jobs and never hearing back but it’s hard to build a technology that provides those types of updates and to start the business we actually ended up building a social job board because it was simple, straightforward, we could get it done and market it quickly. The reality was that we spent time, money, and energy building that and when in fact what we really needed to build, what we needed to focus on was really that big idea we had when we started the business. We didn’t use our time wisely for the first 3-4 months of the business and that lack of focus is probably the biggest mistake we made.
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What is one accomplishment that you are extremely proud of?
I think is the fact that we got close to a 100,000 people to use Startwire on a regular basis and it radically improves their job search process.
What is your overall career goal? What do you want to accomplish that you haven’t already?
There are 115 million people in America looking for work and we think that every single one of them should be using StartWire and our goal is to grow the business to become a broad and large job search platform.
What advice can you offer to your readers regarding career and entrepreneurship?
Whether you get paid on a W2 or you own your own business it’s probably fair to say that everyone in the USA is their own boss. 30 years ago if you worked for a company, you would work for them your entire career or at least a good chunk of it and today that doesn’t happen. You need to actively manage your career and your job and take ownership of what you want to be doing, what you want to get paid, what you do every day, those are the homeworks of being an entrepreneur and I think they need to become the homeworks of everyone that works in the USA.
What do you do for fun & where do you get your Inspiration from?
My greatest inspiration is my family and I have fun spending quality time with them at the farm and playing hockey.
Ways to Connect with Chris:
Website: www.startwire.com
LinkedIn: Christian_Forman
[Post Tags: startwire.com, online job search organizer, online job search engine, how to organize your job search, online job search tools]
From: http://ping.fm/u6yjS
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