Finding someone on the web has become easier and easier, but not always when searching for someone based on his/her occupation.
For businesses and recruiters, locating the right person for a job offer or a sales pitch often entails recruitment firms, lead generation services or other specialized vendors. This is because not everyone like to show off their occupation to the public internet or social media.
But a San Francisco-based startup named Findera is trying to make this process simpler and cheaper, by using a vertical search engine optimized for business professionals.
Funded by Yahoo!'s co-founder Jerry Yang and others, Findera claims that it is the first search engine designed for that purpose.
Findera is simply a search engine, but designed specifically to let users launch a single but structured query with multiple attributes.
Below the search box, in addition to keywords, users can add things like: department, position, location, time at company, time in position, company name and size, revenue, industry and other factors. The results can be saved to lists or exported to spreadsheets, and names can also be bookmarked.
To populate its search results pages, Findera has been crawling and indexing websites to gather additional information if users agree to share their contacts, calendars and other data when they sign up. Findera is available for free without registration. But to get functions like maintaining lists, people must first register.
Registered users can also leverage Findera's machine learning algorithms which learns from users' given preferences to optimize accordingly to such factors as type of people, geography or industry.
As a start, according to Findera's co-founder and COO Christophe Daligault, the search engine has access to more than 130 million profiles in English speaking world, which have all been mapped according to Findera's own graph search technology that understands the relationships between people and companies.
Findera's abilities and approach to the business world, makes it compete with LinkedIn, the professionally-focused social media network.
But this is where Daligault said that LinkedIn can’t offer that kind of search in one pass, and for free.
"You can’t search for VPs of HR at companies with more than $50 in revenue in Linkedin today,” he said.
"And if you pay for their premium subscription service, then you still would not be able to do that in one search. You would have to first search for companies with more than $50 million in revenue and then search for VPs of HR within those companies. This is perfectly fine if you are in a sales role and willing to pay $79 a month."
So here, Findera has quite a bit of advantage in terms of searching for people, if compared to the more sophisticated and feature-packed LinkedIn.
The primary intended users for Findera are recruiters and salespeople, in either case for any size company.