Opinion from Gergo Vari: Challenges and Lessons of Leadership

From selling fruit from his grandfather’s orchard in a Soviet satellite to creating the largest professional networking platform to date, Gergo Vari knows a thing or two about leadership and overcoming challenges. Now, as founder and CEO of Lensa – he is giving job-seekers a new ‘lens’ through which they can see their careers, the current job market, and job-seeker trends.

If you can’t be ‘em, join ‘em. And if you can’t join ‘em… Build your own.

Can you imagine a world in which recent university graduates have no platform or website to find job offers? Well, when Gero Vari graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Canada and returned to his native Hungary, this is exactly the situation he was faced with.

Although not a programmer (or, at that time, not an entrepreneur either), Gergo Vari was a problem-solver. Entrepreneurs, when we break it all down, are, at the heart, problem-solvers. Identify a problem, create a real, practical solution, and get the word out – that’s the essence of successful entrepreneurship.

Since there was no platform or website for recent university graduates to find job offers in Hungary, Gergo Vari put a team together and created one. (He even did much of the coding himself.) That platform would be called profession.hu. And four years after its launch, it would be sold to Sanoma Media Budapest. The sale of profession.hu was, at the time, the largest such transaction in the history of Hungary. It also earned Gergo Vari a feature in Forbes.

From that initial success, Gergo Vari didn’t sit on his laurels. He couldn’t. He’d caught the entrepreneurial bug. And entrepreneurs got to entrepreneurs. So Gergo went on to found and spearhead a variety of e-Ventures and start-ups, including, AffilateMedia, Network.hu, and the social media analysis engine Replise.

When Technology Trumps Tradition

Early on in his career, Gergo Vari came to the realization that the recruitment process was broken and that traditional tools and methods were not equipped to meet the demands of today’s job market.

As founder and CEO of Lensa, he is able to combine his passion for technology and his experience building job-search platforms. Lensa takes full advantage of current technological advancements, notably in the area of machine learning. 

The Lensa machine learning algorithms analyze millions of resumes and job offers almost instantaneously. From these analyses, Lensa AI systems identify patterns, gain insight into trends, and make predictions about the future of the job market. While Lensa aims to match job-seekers with the best opportunities for them, in doing so, they are empowering job-seekers to make the best decisions about their careers and professional goals – decisions based on data, not assumptions, rumors, or clickbait.

Values – The Foundation of value creation

For an entrepreneur who is most widely associated with technology and artificial intelligence, Gergo Vari is constantly reminding us of the strength of human relations both in personal and professional growth.

“I surround myself with smart people and experts who know how to make ideas happen,” says Gergo Vari. “Then I trust them to do so and am there to support them along the way.” 

This marriage of personal relations and technology has been a staple of Gergo’s entrepreneurial career. And it comes as no surprise that this marriage also permeates the culture at Lensa, as highlighted by this extract from Lensa’s mission statement: “We stand together because our community is greater than the sum of its parts.” 

Human interaction and technology aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed. The same can be said of another popular false dichotomy, that of success and failure. In fact, when talking with Gergo Vari about his keys to success, it’s funny how frequently he brings up the subject of failure.

When asked what he does over and over again that he recommends everyone else do, Gergo replies, “Let myself fail at experiments. Not all experiments can succeed, and if you’re not experimenting, you’re not growing.”

This harkens back to the famous quote by Samuel Beckett: “Try, fail. Try again, fail again. Fail better.”

While we can’t guarantee there will be any failures in Gergo Vari’s future, we think it’s safe to say there will be no shortage of trying and experimenting. And we look forward to seeing what those efforts and experimentations bring us.