Indeed

This afternoon I spoke with Indeed CEO Paul Forster to get updates on the job aggregation service. I initially conducted an audio interview with Paul last year. We also took a look at Indeed, SimplyHired and Jobster using Google Trends last week. Indeed launched in 2004.

Paul shared that they are currently serving 7 million unique visitors a month and over 130 million pageviews per month. The company is now profitable and they have 50 employees located at their headquarters in Stamford.

As for their business model, revenue comes mostly from PPC (pay per click) advertising and they also power a large number of job boards including the one on about.com.

One thing I've noticed is that SimplyHired seems to have disappeared. A year ago I received weekly emails from SimplyHired with updates and now, nothing. I had a number of good conversations with their execs. The SimplyHired blog hasn't been updated in nearly four months as well. Maybe they are hands-down building the next release.

Paul says that Indeed has the most comprehensive job search and that they are the leaders in innovation.

The most recent feature they have added is on the backend for companies who use Indeed. It's called Job Analytics and gives companies very detailed statistics on where their jobs are featured, which sites are working, click rates, and the most popular job titles. This tool might actually be good for the Internet marketer at those companies to look at as well. This data could lead to good marketing relationships. If you know a site or blog is working well for job leads, maybe it's something to consider for a larger marketing program.

The last topic we touched on was the current economy. I was thinking that in an economic downturn Indeed would do very well. But of course there are less jobs so it's probably a wash. Paul noted that healthcare and government jobs are still doing very well overall. Financial, retail and housing jobs are the weakest currently.

Paul ended the discussion by stating that Indeed's focus is to provide the best job search for the job seeker and the companies who post their jobs on the site.

Each day this week we will take a look at a group of Internet sites using the new Google Trends for Websites. Up first is a comparison of three of the top job board aggregators: SimplyHired, Indeed and Jobster. Indeed is a NYC-based company, SimplyHired is based in Silicon Valley and Jobster is up there in Seattle.

From the chart below, we see the Indeed is running about 200,000 unique visitors a day, SimplyHired at around 50,000 per day and Jobster comes in last with 20,000 daily unique visitors. To be honest, I would have guessed that SimplyHired was larger than Indeed based on marketing. Indeed investor Fred Wilson noted that the traffic to Indeed is, "a monster". I am going to try to head out to their office in Connecticut next week for an interview.

Each of the companies basically operates under the same model. They aggregate job listings plus add their own listings and offer paid featured listings. In this current economic downturn with people losing their jobs left and right, these services are in a good place to benefit from the unfortunate circumstances.

If you notice a spike in traffic on SimplyHired last summer, it could be due to a pop-under campaign they ran during this time.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has a column this evening about SimplyHired and their apparent traffic explosion as defined by the charts on Compete and Alexa. He notes:

Here’s what the source of the discrepancy might be: We have heard that Simply Hired may have started buying a very large number of “pop-under” advertisements from WhenU.

Apparently comscore filters this type of traffic while Compete and Alexa might not. I will say that my dealings with both Alexa and Compete have left me with a void. I will be posting about my experiences with Compete regarding CN this week.

There might be another answer. Unfortunately I can't assure that this is the answer, but it could provide some additional reasoning and perhaps an add-on effect to Mike's thought of popunder traffic. Earlier this year, SimplyHired launched a blogger feature called "Job-a-matic" whereby bloggers can add job listings to their site. Perhaps this feature has picked up steam and somehow the way it's coded is adding traffic to the SimplyHired tally? Again, this is just speculation on my part.

I have met the executives from SimplyHired and chatted with the Indeed CEO. Both companies are innovating in a space that desperately needs innovation.

Oh yea, and I thought the page view was dead :)

I guess Cn has become the center of the job board reviews. Tonight we take a look at Recruit.net which is a job board aggregator based in Hong Kong for countries in Asia and Australia. They cover jobs for India, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore. While the site is trilingual (English, Chinese and Japanese), I can only review the portions of the site that are in English unfortunately.

At first load, I am very impressed with the design and layout of the site. The site loads quick and has a high level of "polish" to it. They do have some annoying tool tips when you mouse over a city as all they do is repeat the name of the city and are unneeded.

I jumped over to the India section and to my surprise, my searches were saved automatically. Love it. I ran a search for all jobs in Banglagore and what I like is that the results have a smooth feeling to them. If I compare them to the results on Indeed, the results feel just like Google and not like a job search. Grab a RSS feed of your searches and keep up-to-date on the latest postings.

Similar to other job aggregators, Recruit.net uses a "featured jobs" model to generate revenue. Featured jobs appear above other jobs in the search results and can also appear to the right of the search results.

You can also upload your resume and have Recruit.net push it out to the recruiters/employers in your selected locations. Lastly the site offers widgets which you can place on your site or blog. I think they need to somehow offer a level of compensation for the widget placement. It's free advertising for Recruit.net without returning anything to the site owner (ok, yes the site owner can offer more value to its visitors but that just won't cut the mustard).

My concern with all of the aggregator sites including SimplyHired, Indeed, Recruit.net, etc. is whether they are indexing that one "perfect" job. Otherwise, these aggregator sites rock and really can save a lot of time in searching for a new job. That time is better spent networking or learning a new skill.

alarm:clock is reporting that Google is in talks to acquire SimplyHired, a job listing aggregator. VC Ratings does not believe the deal will go through as they believe that Google can create a job search should they desire. But SimplyHired is a media and industry darling and is well respected in Mountain View, home of Google.

I could see Google acquiring Simply Hired just like they did with writely and the others. While I agree with VC Ratings that SH provides a search mechanism, they have some "ins" which could prove beneficial for Google in negotiating later deals (i.e. MySpace).

Kristen notes that neither company provided any comment and Mike notes that, "Simply Hired president Dion Lim, who confirmed that there is “lots of interest in us” from a number of parties but would not comment directly on the rumored deal." I thought I was pretty tight with the Simply Hired team so perhaps if any deal news does come out, I may hear about it quickly.

Indeed is the largest player in the job aggregator market and both companies are doing some great things currently. Check out our previous coverage of Simply Hired and Indeed and my State of the Web: Jobs analysis from February.

This continues my belief of 2007 = year of the acquisition and merger.

For some reason I have always liked job boards. No idea why really but they appeal to me. Especially how they have changed over the years, moving from newspapers and tacking signs on boards to today's job board aggregators. I have reported about SimplyHired a number of times and today I had the chance to speak with Indeed's CEO Paul Forster. Both Indeed and SimplyHired are seeing great growth and I believe that growth will continue to rise this year.

Paul will discuss what Indeed is, differentiation from the competition, Jobster's recent free job listing announcement, how Indeed makes money, the team and more. He will also share some tips for the job seeker and some excellent tips for those wanting to start a web app or business.

Come inside for the audio file of the interview >>

With the news today that Monster has signed a deal with the newspapers that make up The New York Times (NYT, Boston Globe, etc.), I thought it might be a good time to take a look at the State of the Web with respect to jobs. Let's take a look at the players in the job space, who is winning, who is losing, what are the current trends and what will 2007 look like for jobs.

And I want this to be an open document, please add your views in the comments so we can create a holistic view of the current state of the jobs industry online. And we will focus on the computer industry when we look at a niche and lastly I understand that a good bit of the jobs are found through networking.

The bottom line is that the new players in the jobs market are really innovating over the old standard. If the old standards don't innovate soon, they will face the same type of issues Microsoft has over the past 2-3 years.