Hungarian Tech Entrepreneur Gergo Vari’s Journey Toward Building a $22M/Year AI-Powered Job Board
Hungarian-born tech entrepreneur Gergo Vari began creating businesses as a young boy under the communist regime that occupied Hungary. Not exactly the most favorable conditions for entrepreneurship, but when you’ve got business in your blood, there’s nothing else that can be done.
A Taste of Several Cultures
Gergo Vari’s grandfather had a fruit orchard, and young Gergo would sell the fruits to the residents of the local community. However, at the age of 12 (only a few short months before the fall of communism in Hungary), Gergo moved with his family to New York City. In the US, he would discover two passions that would go on to shape his life: exploring and integrating new cultures, and technology.
After completing high school, Gergo moved to Canada to study business at the prestigious McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. As they say in Quebec, ‘jamais deux sans trois’ (when there are two, there are three), he would not be satisfied moving to two different countries, the US and Canada, and so he went off to discover a third, Koblenz, Germany, where he studied business from a German perspective.
His First Taste of Success
A few years later (2001, to be specific), Gergo returned to his native Hungary with the hope of working his way up the corporate ladder. What he discovered was that there was no way for job-seekers to find out about any job openings that might be available. And, by the same token, there was no way for recruiters or companies to easily contact job-seekers.
So, Gergo Vari did what any entrepreneur would do when faced with the absence of a valuable tool. He built one. He, along with his friends, built a platform that matched job-seekers with recruiters. That platform was called profession.hu, and it was an immediate success. After four years of operation, profession.hu had a stranglehold on the Hungarian marketplace. Gergo then sold the company to Sanoma Media Budapest. The sale of profession.hu was, at the time, the largest such transaction in the country’s history.
From there, Gergo continued creating and selling companies, notably AffilateMedia, Network.hu, and the engine for social media analysis, Replise.
Conquering the American Market
After his entrepreneurial successes in Hungary, Gergo Vari set his sights on the US, and he went to where technology companies were booming, San Francisco. He combined his love for and belief in technology with his expertise and experience in recruitment to found Lensa.
Amid the many online job portals, Lensa aimed to stand out by focusing exclusively on the US job market and by integrating technology into the recruitment process, notably with machine learning.
Lensa’s AI-powered machine learning algorithms aim to match job-seekers with jobs they are likely to land and likely to excel in. The end result is a job search with significantly less stress and less frustration all requiring less time and effort from the job-seeker. From the recruiters’ point of view, they are able to fill their open positions faster and with a significantly higher chance of the employee working out and staying with the company.
In today’s climate of high employee quit rates and quiet quitting – not to mention the drastic labor shortage plaguing the US with, in some sectors of activity, a reported 2 to 1 ratio of available jobs per job seeker, this quality of service couldn’t come at a better time.
The Impact of Lensa on the US Job Market – Lensa by the Numbers
Link to the royalty-free image taken from Lensa’s Facebook profile
Since its founding in 2016, Lensa has accrued over 10 million registered members, with an additional 400,000 members signing up every month. This is not surprising when we take into account its excellent reputation for customer service and delivering on Lensa’s promise of successful job matches, as evidenced by the many positive reviews Lensa receives and its high satisfaction rating on the popular company rating site Trustpilot (where it has received a customer review score of “great” in addition to a rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars).
Job seekers can sign up for free job alerts. And during a typical month at Lensa, they deliver over 85 million job alerts to their members. Additionally, over 1750,000 CVs are uploaded to Lensa each month. This creates a snowball effect, as the more members and CVs Lensa has, the more data points Lensa’s algorithms can analyze to provide a continuously improving service.
Author Bio
Russell Ridgeway is an American writer based in Budapest, Hungary. He writes in business, tech, and fashion, as well as creative fiction. You can reach him by email (russell@lensawork.com), or on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.