Redmatch’s solution is a system to filter job candidates, and match them automatically with the right employers.A few years ago, after a particularly hard day at the office in her personnel placement company, an Israeli woman named Shlomit Almog complained to her husband about having to going over dozens, even hundreds, of resumes every day, leaving her time for little else.

Her problem and that of other personnel managers around the world, is that the growth of job-hunting sites on the Internet, which have revolutionized all aspects of personnel recruitment, have also made their jobs more difficult.

With hopeful job applicants able to send resumes at the touch of a button, companies who advertise job openings are instantly flooded with thousands of resumes from unqualified applicants. This forces personnel managers to spend tedious hours weeding through them to find truly suitable candidates.

“Shlomit told me that reading CVs took 80% of her time, and was simply inefficient,” her husband, Gal Almog told the financial daily Globes. “Since I’m considered the family expert in computers and Internet, she asked me
to find a solution for her problem on the Internet.”

Finding an answer to his wife’s problem became the germ of an idea for a new company. As co-founder and CEO of Redmatch, Almog has created technology that makes life easier for employers and job seekers, as well as the newspapers who
run help wanted advertisements. The Redmatch system for brokering communications between employers and candidates and makes sure that only qualified candidates meet with employers who are seriously interested in considering them for a job.

Candidates wishing to register on a Redmatch newspaper’s site are asked to specifically define their profile and the jobs in which they are interested. At the same time, employer-advertiser defines the available job and the profile of the desired candidates. After both sides register, a list of suitable jobs marked in blue (“blue matches”) is sent to the candidate by e-mail. The candidate can then contact the employers. The employers also receive a list of suitable candidates, marked in blue. If they decide to contact one of the
candidates, the employers mark them in red, and the match is made.

So far, the Redmatch has signed an agreement with Swedish company Metro, one of the world’s largest newspaper chains with 11.5 million readers in 14 countries, and with a newspaper group in Wisconsin, which publishes 5,000 want ads per month. And they’re currently negotiating with several dozen newspapers in the US.

Almog, who had worked in high tech for 15 years in Silicon Valley said that he discovered a world previously unknown to him. “I accessed thousands of recruitment sites of various types, both in Israel and overseas, and I noticed that it was very easy to get in. All you have to do is put in a keyword, perform a search, and send a CV. Anyone can do that. The result is that recruitment has become less efficient, not more,” he said.

As an example, Almog says that Monster.com, the world’s largest online recruitment site, receives 50 CVs an hour for every job advertised. “Employers spend $190 billion yearly in the US alone on employee recruitment and
accompanying services. Despite the huge market, however, the meeting between the sellers, buyers, and mediators is managed in extremely primitive fashion, and the Internet only aggravates the problem.”

“In a recession, the employers are swamped with irrelevant CVs. In order to find one good candidate, they have to waste an awful lot of time. In a boom, the problem is the opposite how to find candidates, mainly passive jobseekers,
who are working, but are still open to good offers,” Almog explains.

Redmatch’s solution is a system to filter the candidates, and match them automatically with the right employers. Redmatch has 12 employees in Rosh HaAyin, and one more in his head office in Cleveland.

Almog and Avidor realized that the challenge was not merely to invent a system for matching employers and candidates; they also had to locate the ideal distribution channel.

“We concluded that our target audience should be the print media, which had been hard hit by the development of online recruitment,” Amog recalls. “The press has always dominated help wanted advertising, and reaped big profits from
it. In 2000-2002, however, following the development of recruitment sites, revenue from newspaper want ads fell from $8.7 billion to $4.3 billion. Nothing like that had ever happened before. They simply lost their market to the Internet, because the print media had no advantage. All they could do was put their ads on their websites, but why should a jobseeker go to a newspaper website, when he can get 100 or 1,000 times as many job offers from a site like
monster.com? Why should an employer advertise in a newspaper, when he can reach 100 or 1,000 times as many candidates through a personnel website?”

The Redmatch founders decided they should focus their marketing efforts on the newspapers “and help them compete with the sites, and regain some of the market share they’d lost, through value added services, such as those we were
offering,” Almog says.

Redmatch gained its first two paying customers almost immediately after completing development of its system: Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot, through its Ynet website, and Spanish want ad publication Anuntis, which has three million readers, and publishes 20,000 help wanted advertisements per day. Yediot Aharonots’ systems became fully operative two months ago. Redmatch does not sell its system; it operates help wanted sites for newspapers, and the number of want ads determines it fee.

At the beginning of June, the company signed an agreement with Swedish company Metro, one of the world’s largest newspaper chains with 11.5 million readers in 14 countries. The newspaper is distribute free of charge in subway stations all over Europe. Last week, an agreement was signed with a newspaper group in the US state of Wisconsin, which publishes 5,000 want ads per month Redmatch’s first US customer.

“We’re currently negotiating with several dozen newspapers in the US, in Canada, and in Europe,” Almog mentions. “We feel we’re on the verge of a
breakthrough.”