Liran Kotzer and the people hiding in plain sight

Liran Kotzer credits his wife with getting him into staffing. He liked technology: startups, software, making things work. She came from human resources and saw an opening in Tel Aviv for a recruitment agency that understood the technology behind the job descriptions. In 2007, she suggested they build one. His explanation includes a smile: “And I never say no to my wife.”

They built SeeV. In Kotzer’s telling, it grew to around 80 people. Along the way, an uncomfortable problem became difficult to ignore. The business had accumulated relationships with candidates and hiring managers, yet its records struggled to keep up as those people moved through their careers. An introduction could remain valuable long after the information attached to it had become useless.

That is an oddly personal problem for a software founder to choose. It concerns memory, familiarity and the small courtesy of knowing what someone does now. Kotzer eventually made it the business of Woo, the company he co-founded with Ami Dudu. His career offers a running argument that the next useful connection may begin with somebody you already know.

A programmer discovers the other side of the desk

Kotzer began programming at 13 and later served in Mamram, the Israeli military’s computing and information systems unit. He describes himself as a techie by nature. His education also includes Bar-Ilan University. The technical foundation matters because his eventual interest in recruiting came from someone accustomed to building software, rather than someone encountering it as a finished product.

He and Dudu developed a working partnership across technological military units and other projects. They joined the founding team at Illuminator, which was later acquired by EMC. Dudu gravitated toward the technology. Their partnership gave them room to pursue both.

“I was always more focused on management.”

Liran Kotzer, 2019

Recruitment supplied a different sort of education. A vacancy contains technical requirements, but a successful move also involves a person’s preferences, an employer’s expectations and the timing of a conversation. Building software for that exchange requires deciding which parts can be made systematic and which still need somebody to pick up the phone.

Before Woo, a search engine for working life

In 2008, Kotzer, Dudu and Gil Pal founded the venture behind DoNanza, a search service for freelance work. It brought together projects scattered across the web and matched them to freelancers’ skills and expectations. The ambition was recognisable: make the work of finding work less wasteful.

By December 2009, the company had attracted investment from AfterDox, a group of current and former Amdocs executives, as well as Yossi Vardi. Kotzer explained the service through a practical example: a software specialist could specify work paying above $30 an hour and receive offers meeting that requirement. Even then, the candidate’s conditions were part of the product.

DoNanza received $1 million in financing in 2011 from investors including Innovation Endeavors, Vardi and AfterDox. Its database eventually included more than 360,000 freelancers. It also closed in July 2014. Freelancer.com acquired its assets in March 2015, for an undisclosed price.

Those dates deserve to sit together. Closing a business and later selling its assets are separate events. A founder’s biography becomes more useful when it leaves that distinction intact. DoNanza shows Kotzer working on employment matching years before Woo, with a substantial audience and a conclusion more complicated than a celebratory acquisition headline.

An opportunity without the public announcement

Woo was founded in 2015 and launched publicly in February 2016. Its early proposition addressed an awkward interval in professional life: a person might consider another job without wanting to announce a search. Curiosity rarely comes with a resignation letter, and employers do not always appreciate the distinction.

The service let technology professionals explore opportunities anonymously. Candidates could specify what might persuade them to move. Companies could assess a match before either side invested in a long process. At the February 2016 funding announcement, Kotzer emphasised controlling admission to the service so that both candidates and employers would have a worthwhile experience.

That preference for a balanced marketplace also shaped his account of Woo’s design. The company needed to understand both parties. An employer’s vacancy alone could not describe a successful match, any more than a candidate’s résumé could explain every reason to accept a job.

In practice, the wish list included location, company type, salary range and work-life balance. Kotzer put the threshold plainly in 2018: companies had to meet the candidate’s requirements. “Otherwise they will not hear from us.” Silence, in that formulation, was a feature. Anyone whose inbox has become a second job may appreciate the restraint.

The machine began with people

There is a pleasing inconvenience in the history of Woo’s automation. The founders began with 20 recruiters doing the work manually while the technology team studied the process. Building the machine-learning recruiter, Helena, took about three years. Human work supplied the observations from which the software could be developed.

Dudu described that early arrangement as a way to validate the idea and collect data before completing the product. The team could deal with customers while learning what the technology needed to do. By 2019, Kotzer said the recruiters were configuring Helena as the system took over recruiting tasks.

The approach fits advice he gave in 2018: “Don’t think of scale at all when building your business”. He put customer value ahead of automating every backstage activity. It is a useful warning from somebody selling automation. An elegant system still needs to produce something a customer wants. Tidiness behind the curtain offers little consolation when the audience has gone home.

In November 2017, Woo announced Helena alongside a $7 million Series A led by Lord David Alliance, with existing investors participating. Reported total funding reached about $11.4 million. The proceeds were intended to improve the technology and support expansion in the United States. Helena was presented as serving employers and job seekers, carrying forward the company’s interest in both sides of a match.

The address book that keeps falling behind

By his 2024 Engage London appearance, Kotzer’s work had a more specific operational setting: keeping records in Bullhorn, a recruitment system, current as people changed careers. Woo’s role included helping agencies reconnect with candidates and contacts already familiar with them. The question had moved closer to the recruiter’s own desk.

Later that year, on The Staffing Ring, he discussed reliable, curated data, search, automation and measuring whether agencies were actually using their information effectively. His argument placed existing assets at the centre of technology decisions. Buying another tool would have to make sense in relation to the information an agency already held.

There is a modest economic idea beneath that position. A relationship takes effort to establish. Its record can become stale without anybody deciding to abandon it. If the agency can reconnect the person with their current circumstances, an old introduction may become useful again. The appeal is easy to understand; the difficult work lies in keeping the details sufficiently current to act on.

At SIM TechExec in 2025, Kotzer was listed to lead a roundtable on the cost of using job boards while neglecting internal data. Another session addressed enriched applicant-tracking records and revenue growth without matching increases in headcount. These are questions about how an agency operates, where it spends, and what its accumulated knowledge is worth.

Leave room for the conversation

Kotzer’s account of candidate experience gives the technology a human purpose. In a SourceFlow discussion, he linked a good experience to the quality of the relationship. Knowing that someone has changed roles, been promoted or moved into a different industry can change both the timing and substance of a recruiter’s approach.

He also described a continuing place for people in the process. Automation can help identify an opening or assemble useful context. Negotiating expectations and building trust still involve human contact. That division of labour makes sense of a career spent moving between software and staffing: each supplies knowledge the other needs.

Outside work, Kotzer sails, plays piano and spends time with his family. Those interests make a welcome appearance in a professional biography otherwise crowded with matching systems and databases. They need no business metaphor. A piano is allowed to remain a piano.

His public calendar continues to put him among staffing operators. The November 2026 TechServe Executive Summit schedule lists him on a recruiting-workflow panel moderated by Barb Bruno, alongside Andy Jones, Matthew Marini and Anthony Oliveto. As of October, that is an upcoming engagement, centred on the practical allocation of recruiting work between people and automated systems.

That leaves a practical test for his work: whether an agency can turn what it remembers into a timely conversation. A name in a database is a beginning. Someone still has to recognise the occasion and make the call.

From DoNanza’s freelance projects to Woo’s candidate matches and agency records, Kotzer has kept returning to the distance between an available opportunity and the person who could use it. The products have changed. The appeal of shortening that distance has endured. For a founder who entered recruitment at his wife’s suggestion, he has found plenty to keep him occupied.