Last week a relatively unknown recruitment technology player called Zippia announced a significant round of funding that will help it continue to build a tool for job seekers in their quest for the ideal career pathway.

The San Mateo based company raised a Series A investment of $8.5 million led by e.ventures, with participation from existing shareholders including MHS Capital, NextView Ventures, and Correlation Ventures. This brings the startup’s total capital raised to $12 million since its founding in early 2015.

Zippia, uses machine learning and data aggregation to create its ‘career map’, which helps job seekers understand career pathways like never before. Zippia’s tools provide job seekers unique resources, creating a more complete understanding of job titles and career options.

I asked them a few questions over email about the site.

How did you get to $1 million users is that organic growth/paid or both?

1 million visits a month is 99% organic, mostly from direct, search, and email. We rank decently for job related searches, and continue to rise every algorithm update.

Do you aggregate jobs from other publishers?

Yes, right now we aggregate from more than 5 different job listing sites and also allow people to post jobs directly to the site.

What problem do you feel you are solving that sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter already do?

We are solving the issues people have around career decisions and not just helping them find the next job. They can see how their job choices impact their chances for other jobs down the road. We also try to do an automated, personalized search above and beyond the simple filters Indeed allows you using machine learning. Users say our job recommendations are the most personalized they’ve ever seen.

If you wanted to try it, go here and see how deep we drill down when you set up a search: https://www.zippia.com/

How do you make money?

Revenue hasn’t been a focus to this point as we work on building up the job seeker side of the marketplace. We acquired funding based on our traffic growth, potential for future growth, and revenue potential. There’s also nothing close to what we’re doing in the career space.

Indeed and Zip have huge marketshare lead on you, how do you expect to compete?

We believe there is much more data that needs to become transparent and accessible in the job space that isn’t being shown at the moment. Additionally, we want to create a job mentor for everyone so that they can advance in their careers.

My Take

Having run my own career sites over the years it’s hard to see a player like Zippia unseating the reigning vendors in this space. They may have some cool technology to help job seekers uncover the right job but that is not a major problem that most candidates face today.

And since they have yet to focus on a revenue model they may have difficulty extracting cash from employers who are already inundated with offers from plenty of other recruitment sites. I would also caution them about trying to monetize the job seeker which is not a proven model in the job board world.

But they have a solid war chest to at least give it a try.

The question is, will it fly?