RiseSmart founder Sanjay Sathe.

DALLAS – Sanjay Sathe, founder and chief executive officer of RiseSmart, is bringing a human touch to online job searching and, in an ironic twist to outsourcing critics, is using Indian workers to find American jobs.

The Dallas-based RiseSmart is an online executive job search service focusing on positions over $100,000. Amidst the unorganized clutter of online job listings, RiseSmart purports to help executives rise above the mess – prescreening online search results for a match based on specific profiles. The key hook to what RiseSmart offers is the company’s “job concierge,” a company employee that reviews resumes and job preferences and matches jobs for individual customers from a search of thousands of job portals and corporate job sights. According to the company, its job search engine scans more than a million job listings in every search.

Sathe said the concierge service bridges the gap between the traditional job posting boards and search engines, popularized by sites such as Monster, and executive job search firms and career coaches. He views it as the best of both worlds – the efficiency of personalized attention and the far-reaching possibility of Internet searching.

“This is the first time there is human intervention in the online job space,” said Sathe. “Technology, at the end of the day, can only do so much.”

From the perspective of someone looking for an executive job position online, Sathe believes RiseSmart addresses the two most important factors: time and relevant job openings. “If you are a high level executive it is hard to find a new job,” he said. “The most important thing is time … you can spend a lot of time searching for a job online.

“The other thing that was obvious was the relevance of results that you get back [from an online search] was very poor,” he added.

RiseSmart’s “concierges” intercede in the automated-search process to ensure the job listings are all relevant to the company’s customers. Sathe points out that this human intervention reduces the number of job listings that job seekers have to search through from thousands to a more manageable number.

All of the company’s “concierges,” currently approximately 20, work out of RiseSmart’s service center in New Delhi, India. “The irony is we are using Indian talent to help American workers get U.S. jobs,” said Sathe.

Since RiseSmart launched its subscription-based services through its Web site in November 2007 it has notched over 2,000 registered users. Subscription options include an introductory offer of $43.95 per month, or $109.95 for a three-month plan. The company offers a free, three-day trial and, according to Sathe, 80 percent of those who have tried the trial have become subscribers.

According to statistics listed on the site, job openings include: 9,097 C-level positions, 23,375 vice president positions, 147,070 director positions, 605,202 manager positions and 739,327 professional/specialty positions.

RiseSmart has raised $1.5 million in initial funding and has drawn some impressive investors with a strong background in the job search and human resources industries. They include” Craig Stamm, former chief financial officer of CareerBuilder.com and Headhunter.net; Mark Hamdan, founder and CEO of HRsmart, a human resources technology company; and Louis Ramery, senior vice president of relationship marketing at Sears Holdings Corp.

Sathe said that his company is currently looking for another round of funding and will use the money for expanding services to include resume-writing and career coaching services. In addition, RiseSmart plans to target companies by offering recruitment services helping them to find and screen job candidates. “We are going to be participating on both sides of the fence,” Sathe said.

Currently, RiseSmart is only targeting the U.S. market, but has plans to offer services to job seekers in Europe and Asian nations such as India and China.

RiseSmart is not without competition in the executive online job search market – competitors include TheLadders and ExecuNet – but the company separates itself by actively searching the Web for jobs, as opposed to relying on recruiters or companies to post jobs to its site.

Feedback from users has been very encouraging, Sathe said.

“Before RiseSmart, I had been visiting five or six different job boards every week, in addition to corporate sites for several companies I’d had my eye on for C-level consulting in the U.S.,” said Gary Iyer, a Houston-based consultant for Intellysys Inc. “RiseSmart aggregates jobs from all these sources – then separates the wheat from the chaff so I don’t have to wade through hundreds of automated search results. I’ve been extremely pleased with the service.”

“I used subscription-based job sites before, but I never felt comfortable with them because I kept coming across $100k-plus jobs on other job boards. Why didn’t my subscription site have these jobs? After I joined RiseSmart, I didn’t have this problem. I felt confident that if the job I wanted was posted online somewhere, RiseSmart would find it for me,” said Joselyn Conti, a marketing director in New Jersey.

RiseSmart founder Sathe, a native of Mumbai, came to the United States in 2000 and has a background in marketing and general management. Prior to founding RiseSmart, he served as vice president of enterprise data management for Sabre Holdings, a $2.5 billion travel commerce business, which is the parent company of Travelocity. Before Sabre, he was senior vice president of marketing at Brierley & Partners, a customer-relationship-management and loyalty-management company, with customers such as Hilton Hotels Corp., The Hertz Corp.,  Blockbuster, Sony Corp. and Nokia. He also served in marketing management roles in Europe and Asia with Lufthansa and HSBC.

Sathe has a master’s degree in business management from the Asian Institute of Management in Manila and has completed an executive education program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

According to Sathe, he came up with the idea for RiseSmart during his own job search for an executive position in 2006. He said he tried executive search firms, as well as looking on his own online and was disappointed in the results, particularly in searching online. “There was a huge mess. There was literally thousands of listings and posting,” he said. His quest with RiseSmart was to help combat this mess.

And, so far, Sathe is happy with the way things have turned out.

 “I think our service will alleviate the pain of a lot of people in the job search,” he said. “Plus, with the economy today and layoffs, we can help people find jobs.”