7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Recruiting Marketplace

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a Recruiting Marketplace

Building a two-sided marketplace means choosing sides. Most founders pick the money side—the buyers with budgets and urgency. John Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of Paraform, made the opposite bet. He obsessed over recruiters first, companies second. Three years later, Paraform has 8,000 active jobs and is adding 400-500 new jobs monthly, with 80% from net new logos.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, John shared the GTM strategies that transformed Paraform from another recruiting platform into one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the talent space. These lessons apply far beyond recruiting—they’re fundamental principles for anyone building marketplace businesses.

Lesson 1: Solve for Supply Side Efficiency, Even When Demand Has the Budget

Every marketplace founder faces this tension: companies have money, but suppliers create value. John went all-in on recruiters. “We really focused on the supply side, which is recruiters,” he explains. “We really wanted to make sure that they were successful and that the money would follow if we could prove that we could make them more successful.”

This wasn’t just founder intuition. John had lived the recruiter experience. He knew the core problem wasn’t finding candidates—it was the massive waste built into contingency recruiting. When 40-50 agencies work the same job, 49 of them waste their time completely.

The insight: fix supplier efficiency first, and demand will follow. Paraform made recruiters 10x more efficient through exclusivity and transparency. Companies came because placements actually happened. “Once we prove that we can actually make placements, then we can go direct to those brands,” John says.

For marketplace builders: your supply side is probably more broken than your demand side. Fix that first, even if it means slower initial revenue growth.

Lesson 2: Force Structural Changes That Benefit Your Supply Side

Most marketplace platforms accept industry norms. John challenged them directly. Traditional recruiting runs on contingency—dozens of agencies competing for the same placement. Paraform said no. “We kind of force exclusivity,” John explains. “We make it so that only one recruiter is working on a search at a time.”

This was controversial. Companies were used to hedging their bets across multiple agencies. But exclusivity fundamentally changed recruiter economics. Instead of a 2% chance of placement across 50 jobs, recruiters had a 20% chance across 5 exclusive assignments.

The structural change created competitive advantage. Paraform could attract better recruiters because the math actually worked. Those recruiters delivered better results. Better results attracted better companies. The flywheel started spinning.

For marketplace builders: identify the structural inefficiency that makes your supply side miserable. Then build mechanics that eliminate it, even if it means fighting industry norms.

Lesson 3: Use Agencies as Your Enterprise Wedge

Paraform’s early user base was independent recruiters—great for proving the model, terrible for landing Nvidia or Google. Rather than spend years building enterprise sales capability, John found a shortcut through recruiting agencies.

“They have these enterprise relationships with like Nvidia, Google, Meta, Amazon, and we don’t,” John admits candidly. So Paraform offered agencies something valuable: access to their marketplace of independent recruiters while maintaining client relationships and economics. “They can leverage the marketplace and all the recruiters on it, but they still maintain the relationship with the client and they can still take like 30% of the fee.”

Agencies posted enterprise jobs. Independent recruiters made placements. Enterprise companies saw results. Eventually, those companies signed up directly. The agency channel became a bridge, not a permanent intermediary.

For marketplace builders: you don’t need to build every capability yourself. Find partners who have what you lack, structure win-win deals, and use them as bridges to your ultimate customers.

Lesson 4: Product-Led Growth Works in Unlikely Places

Recruiting felt like a relationship business—handshakes, phone calls, trust-building lunches. John proved you could make it product-led. “We’re very much product led growth, product led sales,” he emphasizes.

For recruiters, Paraform removed every possible friction point. “We definitely tried to make it as easy as possible for recruiters to onboard.” No lengthy approvals, no sales calls, no manual contracts. Sign up, browse jobs, submit candidates. The platform handles everything else.

For companies, the same principle applied. “The majority of companies, over half of the companies are actually signing up themselves,” John notes. They post jobs, review submissions, and hire without ever talking to Paraform’s team.

This approach scaled faster than traditional sales. “We have about 8,000 jobs on the platform right now,” John reveals. “We’re averaging about 400 to 500 jobs posted per month.” The efficiency was remarkable—one small team supporting thousands of active placements.

For marketplace builders: even in “relationship-driven” industries, removing friction scales faster than adding salespeople. Build the product to sell itself.

Lesson 5: Create Transparency That Changes Behavior

Most recruiting platforms hide what happens after candidate submission. Companies ghost recruiters. Recruiters have no idea if their candidates are any good. The opacity perpetuates dysfunction.

Paraform exposed everything. When recruiters submit candidates, they see whether companies schedule interviews, make offers, or ignore submissions entirely. This transparency changed behavior on both sides.

Recruiters learned which companies actually hired versus which just collected resumes. They could focus energy on real opportunities. Companies knew Paraform tracked their responsiveness, creating accountability. The result was a healthier marketplace where good actors thrived and bad actors left.

John built additional transparency into success metrics. Recruiters could see their acceptance rates, interview conversion rates, and offer rates. This data helped them improve. “That’s kind of like our bread and butter,” John says about making recruiters more efficient through data.

For marketplace builders: opacity protects bad actors. Transparency rewards good ones. If you want quality on your platform, make behavior visible.

Lesson 6: Time Your Enterprise Transition Carefully

Paraform initially served SMBs—startups and growth companies that moved fast and valued efficiency. As the platform matured, John eyed enterprise. But he didn’t rush the transition.

The team waited until they had proof points. They needed successful placements, reliable infrastructure, and enterprise-grade security. They needed reference customers. “Once we prove that we can actually make placements, then we can go direct to those brands,” John explains about the timing.

When they did move upmarket, they rebuilt significant parts of the experience. Enterprise companies had different buying processes, different security requirements, different expectations. Paraform adapted without abandoning their product-led roots.

The careful timing paid off. “80% of those are net new logos,” John says about their monthly job additions. They were adding enterprise customers without churning their SMB base.

For marketplace builders: moving upmarket too early kills your advantage. Moving too late means leaving money on the table. Time it based on proof points, not revenue pressure.

Lesson 7: Build for the Platform Future, Not Just the Current Product

John thinks bigger than recruiting. He sees Paraform as infrastructure for the entire talent market. “We want to build more services on the talent side of the business,” he explains about future vision.

This long-term thinking shapes current decisions. Every feature, every integration, every partnership gets evaluated against platform potential. Can this scale beyond recruiting? Does this work for RPO services? Could this support other talent functions?

The platform vision also guides product development. Rather than building recruiting-specific features, Paraform builds marketplace mechanics that could apply to any talent service. This makes future expansion easier.

For marketplace builders: your current product is version one. Build the underlying mechanics to support version ten, even if you’re only selling version one today.

The Marketplace Playbook That Actually Works

John’s GTM strategy breaks conventional marketplace wisdom. Focus on supply when demand has the money. Force structural changes that challenge industry norms. Use partners as bridges instead of building everything yourself. Make relationship businesses product-led. Create radical transparency.

These aren’t just tactics—they’re principles born from understanding that marketplaces succeed when they solve fundamental inefficiencies, not just add a platform layer on top of broken processes.

“We really wanted to make sure that they were successful and that the money would follow if we could prove that we could make them more successful,” John says about his supply-side obsession. That philosophy—prove value before extracting it—explains why Paraform grew from zero to 8,000 jobs while dozens of other recruiting platforms stagnated.

The recruiting industry needed someone to rebuild it from first principles. John did exactly that, and created a playbook for marketplace building that works far beyond talent.