Go-to-Market for a SaaS based recruitment solution | Vasitum

At Vasitum, we set out to build a truly AI-powered, end-to-end recruitment platform — one that could help employers seamlessly source, screen, interview, hire, and onboard candidates.

By April 2020, the platform had already grown to over 75,000 active candidates and 15,000 recruiters, with companies like Snapdeal, PropTiger, Avantha, Square Yards, and Lemon Tree actively hiring through us.

Vasitum officially launched in January 2019, and I joined the team in April that year — when the marketing engine was still a blank slate.

I was responsible for building the entire marketing function from scratch. That meant hiring and leading a cross-functional team across SEO, social media, paid marketing, design, content, and brand communication. We launched high-impact campaigns that not only delivered numbers but also sparked organic buzz across platforms.

One of our campaigns even gained media coverage on Afaqs, and our marketing efforts collectively crossed 1 million impressions — not through brute ad spend, but through smart creative, storytelling, and consistency.

From day one, we knew we were dealing with a classic marketplace challenge — the chicken-and-egg problem. Without job listings, no candidates. Without candidates, no recruiters.

So, we engineered an artificial supply.

We started scraping job listings from third-party sources, including job boards and company career pages. This created enough initial inventory to attract job seekers and keep them engaged while we worked on onboarding recruiters.

To build early interest in the platform, we shot and produced in-house videos to showcase the product and highlight job opportunities — one of which gained great traction early on.

We didn’t stop there. To add value beyond listings, we launched a library of free courses for job seekers — focused on interview prep, resume writing, and answering common hiring questions. It wasn’t just about traffic, it was about building trust with the audience from the start.

Vasitum: Building an AI Recruitment Platform from the Ground Up

Vasitum was built with the ambition to become a fully AI-powered recruitment solution — one that could source, screen, interview, hire, and onboard candidates. By April 2020, we had over 75,000 active candidates and 15,000 recruiters using the platform, including companies like Snapdeal, PropTiger, Avantha, Square Yards, and Lemon Tree.

I joined the founding team just three months after launch, in April 2019, when the marketing engine was still non-existent. My first task was to build a full-stack marketing team from scratch, spanning SEO, social media, paid campaigns, content, design, and brand communication.

We ran creative, high-impact campaigns that drove over 1 million impressions and earned organic coverage in platforms like Afaqs — all with limited budgets and zero brand recognition.

Solving the Chicken-and-Egg Problem

As with any marketplace, we faced the classic chicken-and-egg challenge — attracting job seekers without recruiters and vice versa.

To solve this, we created an artificial supply of job listings by scraping roles from third-party sources including job boards and company sites. This brought in early traffic from job seekers, allowing us time to build up the recruiter side.

We also produced in-house videos to generate interest and awareness around the platform, and bundled the experience with value — offering free interview prep courses to job seekers as part of the onboarding journey.

Initial Traction: From Aspirational LinkedIn to Practical ICP

At first, the vision was to build a LinkedIn-like network. But we quickly realized the risk of that scale and pivoted to focus on practical recruiter needs.

We defined a clear Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): solo recruiters, founders, and hiring managers in startups and SMBs.

We prioritized features that mattered most to them:

Company pages to showcase culture and roles
Public job listings
A lightweight ATS with pre-screening and interview tools
Resume parsing for recruitment agencies

With access to a recruiter database (via Maven Workforce) and targeted LinkedIn outreach, we started onboarding recruiters with a forever-free plan and free trials for higher tiers.

Usage data, like jobs posted and logins, was fed into the sales team to nurture leads and drive conversions. For users who dropped off, we launched automated remarketing via our marketing automation platform.

Email Drip Campaigns that Actually Worked

We built two high-performing drip journeys — one for job seekers and one for recruiters.

For candidates, the journey was triggered by sign-ups or course enrollments. Those who hadn’t yet applied to jobs were nudged with relevant listings. Course participants were prompted to explore the platform further.

For recruiters, we crafted text-based drip sequences around practical and useful topics — employment law essentials, employer branding basics, and onboarding best practices.

These campaigns performed well above benchmarks and played a major role in nurturing and activating new accounts.

Content-Led Growth and Backlink Strategy

To strengthen SEO and domain authority, we pursued a lean backlink strategy. We identified long-tail, conversion-focused keywords with low competition, created informative content around them, and reached out to niche blogs.

This helped us earn high-quality backlinks without any paid spend.

While our blog was new, we parallel-published on Medium to get early visibility. Some of those articles began ranking for key terms, adding another layer of organic discovery.

Owning the “Hiring Drives” Keyword

We noticed that large corporates were running hiring drives with no consistent recruitment partners. So, we started covering them on our blog — not just to inform, but to attract traffic. Soon, we ranked #1 for the keyword “Hiring Drives,” bringing in 2,000+ visits per month.

Expired drive pages were redirected to Vasitum’s job portal, converting that attention into sign-ups.

These posts also performed strongly on social media because of their broad appeal to job seekers across sectors.

Google Jobs, Indexing API, and Organic Traffic Spikes

We implemented Google’s Job Indexing API, which increased our traffic from Google Jobs by over 20% within two months.

At the same time, we launched affiliate and content marketing programs that grew our user base by 15% month over month.

PPC Innovation with MECI Segmentation

For paid campaigns, we implemented the MECI (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) framework — segmenting audiences into distinct groups and testing different creative combinations for each.

This allowed us to personalize ad experiences at scale and significantly boosted our PPC conversion rates.

Marketing Analytics, Automated

We built a fully automated reporting dashboard using Supermetrics, StitchData, Google Data Studio, and Google Sheets.

This gave all stakeholders real-time access to performance metrics while eliminating manual reporting.

Growth Funnel Optimization: Recruiter Edition

We structured Vasitum’s recruiter growth funnel across 6 stages:

Awareness: LinkedIn outreach, cold emails
Acquisition: Free courses, eBooks, forever-free plan
Activation: Job posted and profile created
Revenue: Paid tier upgrades
Retention: Ongoing subscription and usage
Referral: Recruiters bringing in other recruiters

We improved the activation rate by over 5% by templatizing job descriptions, reducing form fields, and introducing Google SSO to simplify sign-ups.

We also launched a Refer & Earn program to drive upgrades to the Standard and SMB plans. Our enterprise onboarding included sales enablement and promotional boosts to showcase their listings — creating trust and increasing recruiter and job seeker engagement simultaneously.

With SEO-led growth hacks and guerrilla marketing plays, we built a lean, scalable acquisition engine for both recruiters and candidates.

Strategic Product Involvement

I worked closely with product, UX, sales, and tech teams to guide roadmap prioritization.

This ensured that product developments aligned with activation and conversion goals — not vanity features.

Vasitum V3.1.3: From Portal to Platform

By version 3.1.3, Vasitum had evolved into a recruitment OS — onboarding candidates and recruiters, conducting AI-based pre-screening, and delivering funnel metrics across the hiring journey.

We had gone from a barebones MVP to a platform trusted by thousands — all while keeping growth costs efficient and retention user-first.

Building Efficiencies: Turning Vasitum into a Self-Running Growth Engine

On the recruiter side, we mapped our growth funnel across six core stages:

Awareness: LinkedIn outreach, cold emails
Acquisition: Free recruiter courses, eBooks on recruitment metrics, free trials, and a forever-free plan
Activation: Recruiters signing up, creating profiles, and posting their first job
Revenue: Recruiters converting to paid tiers
Retention: Monthly subscription renewals
Referral: Recruiters referring peers to the platform

To improve activation, we introduced templatized job descriptions based on role type, significantly reducing friction in the job-posting flow. We also streamlined the signup experience by eliminating unnecessary mandatory fields and enabling Google SSO, which led to a noticeable increase in signup completion rates.

To fuel referrals, we launched a Refer & Earn program that rewarded recruiters with discounted access to the Standard and SMB plans when they brought new users to the platform.

Our enterprise onboarding involved close collaboration with the sales team. We prioritized promoting job listings from these enterprise clients across the platform to boost visibility, attract candidates at scale, and establish credibility among other recruiters.

By combining organic search growth hacks with guerrilla marketing tactics, we lowered our acquisition cost and built a self-sustaining growth engine — one that continuously brought in both recruiters and job seekers with minimal paid effort.