The nature of online job recruiting has changed dramatically in recent years, says Gal Almog, CEO of RealMatch. Formerly popular single destination sites like Monster.com are seeing a decline while search engines like Indeed are growing. And the rise of LinkedIn has been a game changer in the market.

“But most importantly, the idea that you need a network of sites to get enough response to job ads is a notion that is now accepted by almost everyone in the market,” he says. “RealMatch is currently the only player that offers that benefit.”

We recently checked in with Gal – who says he started RealMatch in 2007 to help out his wife (more on that in a minute) – to get his predictions for the future of job matching and digital career sites and learn more about how RealMatch is poised to meet the ever-changing demands of both recruiters and job seekers alike.

Here’s what he had to say:

Can you tell us a little about your professional background? How did you come to start RealMatch?

I have been an entrepreneur for the last 20 years. I started RealMatch based on idea I got from my wife. She is a recruiter, and I visited her one day in her office and wondered about the huge pile of resumes on her desk. She shared with me her frustration and asked me to help her find a solution that would make her life easier and more efficient. I started looking for a solution and was surprised that I could not find anything really exciting. This gave me the idea for RealMatch. You can say that I started a company to help my wife.

How do you hope to differentiate RealMatch from your competitors?

RealMatch solves the two most difficult challenges of the recruitment market: reach and quality. The reach is solved through our network of job sites that have the combined power to reach more talent than any single destination site (37 million users). The quality is solved through our unique job-matching technology. I am not aware of any company that has these two competitive advantages.

What is your mission at RealMatch?

The mission of RealMatch is to connect all the talent and all the job opportunities in the world in the most efficient way. We do this through a very successful partnership with digital publishers whose job sites we power.

What is job matching, and why is it so important from a digital publisher’s perspective?

Keyword search is inefficient and antiquated. It requires users to keep searching for jobs and get irrelevant results. It is one sided and, hence, highly inefficient. Conversely, job matching is reciprocal and highly effective. It screens, grades and ranks the candidates (both active and passive) and saves time for employers. This is a benefit that publishers can offer to advertisers as part of their job site. Advertisers appreciate it and come back to publisher sites to post their ads, thereby generating additional revenues. It is a key to any successful job site.

What are the best practices for effective job matching?

The rule is simple: The more information we have, the better the matching is. For matching to occur, it is not enough for the candidate to want the job or for the employer to want the candidate. The interest has to be reciprocal. The candidate needs to be qualified for the job AND be interested in it. The employer needs to want the candidate but not to have to waste their time on candidates who are not interested in their jobs. It is very much like romantic dating. A good match is always reciprocal.

How are job-matching solutions becoming more accurate and useful than in the past? What more do you wish this type of software could do?

People are tired of keyword searching. They also do not wish to keep searching for jobs. They want the software to do the job for them while they can remain anonymous. But in order for a match to be effective, we need information from both the employer (a detailed job description) and the candidate (a detailed resume). If we are missing information, the quality of the match is reduced, but we can still add missing information during the job application process. More and more people who are using the RealMatch system are realizing the benefits of the matching in saving them time and in increasing the quality of their results, and they take the time to add more information. The next step in job matching will be to learn from user behavior and to refine their matching based on actual behavior of the masses.

Why do you think the services and tools that RealMatch offers are more applicable than ever in today’s digital world?

As I said above, we are able to continuously improve the ability of candidates and employers to find each other and to engage in a whole new way that is dramatically more efficient and rewarding. This is achieved through our growing network of powered-by job sites and our job-matching technology. We believe that in a few years millions of companies will take advantage of our service through the job site of their choice. Millions of people will interact with companies on a whole new level and the entire job market will become dramatically more efficient.

What do you think is the future for RealMatch and online recruiting in general? What are the biggest challenges you see ahead of you? What are the most exciting changes on the horizon?

Since we work with digital publishers, our challenge is to make them successful. We are working hard to grow the network of our powered-by sites and are seeing great traction in both the local markets (newspapers, broadcast, etc.) as well as in the vertical markets (trade publication, niche job sites, etc.). The key to our success and to our partners’ success is the continuous growth of our network, the user database and the quality of our recruitment solution. We are going beyond the job sites in our efforts to find and engage talent on digital publishers’ content pages. This will be an exciting development in our future and the future of our industry.

What was the worst job you’ve ever had? How would RealMatch have helped you avoid that position?

I never had a bad job because most of my life I was an entrepreneur and created my own jobs. For seven years, I was an officer in the Israel Special Forces. It was not a regular job, but it taught me things that I could never have learned anywhere else. I am very grateful for that experience.