Interview with Julie Craft, Simply Hired

A couple of weeks ago, I read an entry on the Simply Hired blog about specialty job filters such as a filter for Working Mothers. This really seemed innovative to me and I wanted to learn more. I requested an interview with Julie Craft, author of the article and the head of the sales and advertising department at Simply Hired to find out more.

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Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a partial text transcript of the audio interview. Please listen to the audio for the entire discussion.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?
Julie: My name is Julie Craft and prior to joining Simply Hired, I spent the last 15 years in various sales and marketing positions with companies like AT&T, Philip Morris and Federated. At AT&T, I ran very large teams and one of those teams setup the first ecommerce for small businesses. Kind of fun because it was like a startup environment inside of a big company. I attended executive business school at Columbia University and a Masters in Organizational Development from Illinois Benedictine University

Allen: What is Simply Hired and what do you do there?
Julie: Simply Hired which can be found at simplyhired.com is one of the largest search engines for jobs. Our mission in life is to try to help the job seekers solve every pain point in finding their dream job. My role at Simply Hired is that I run the sales and advertising department and am responsible for advertising sales, syndication channels and revenue generating partnerships.

Allen: Do you know how many people actually got hired thru using Simply Hired?
Julie: That is an interesting question but that would actually be tracked through our partners. People come to our site to search over 5 million jobs, then they tailor their job search including corporate culture type. And then we
connect them to companies that are looking for talent. So it would be the company that tracks that data.

Allen: How many sites do you aggregate together?
Julie: We have jobs from hundreds of thousands of companies coming from thousands of sites and that does include employer web sites and Monster and CareerBuilder and niche job sites.

Allen: How much time/effort do you estimate saving a job seeker over looking at all of the individual boards?
Julie: We have not done a formal research study, but everybody has looked for a job and knows how time consuming and painful it is.

Allen: Who do you consider the competitors to Simply Hired?
Julie: Well of course everyone likes to say there is no competition. But I would say the most similar company to Simply Hired would be indeed.com. They are similar because they are a job search engine, they are different in their focus. They are all about the job search piece which is great and adding value. But we believe that is only one piece of the entire process. When someone is looking for a job it is more than just the search. What we like to do is add applications on top of the job search helping the job seeker find the dream job, whether it is a lifestyle they are looking for, whether its getting their resume out to multiple job boards instantly, so we like to layer applications on top of the job search process making it that much more effective for the job seeker in finding their dream job.

Allen: How does Simply Hired make money?
Julie: Well most of us are here for fun but we do need to make money as well. We offer advertising on our site that can come in a variety of ways and we also offer featured/sponsored jobs. Companies can pay per click and have their jobs go to the top of the search results. What we are priding ourselves on is that we are still upholding the integrity of our search algorithm. So when their job goes to the top it is only going to the top within a very relevant search for the job seeker. That is fairly new, we launched it about three weeks ago and already have about 1 million sponsored jobs listed and has been quite effective for us.

The second way is resumes, we have a product called Resume Post. When job seekers find a job they are interested in, they can actually build a resume and send it out instantly to six of the major job boards. It is free for job seekers, but the boards that are receiving the job leads pay for them.

And then we also have customized solutions with some biz-dev partnerships where we do some custom work and those are all fee-based.

Allen: What does the user base look like for Simply Hired?
Julie: It is really mainstream. We have done a couple demographic studies and the make up is across the board in terms of gender, years of experience as well as geographies and industries. So we feel we are very representative of America. We are a bit heavy on tech and on the healthcare industries.

Allen: What is the makeup of the Simply Hired team and what is life like working at Simply Hired?
Julie: I am smiling while I speak because it is such a joy to work at Simply Hired. We have 50 employees, and probably speak 50 languages. It is a very diverse, eclectic group of very talented individuals. We really are like a Simply Hired family. We all have a passion for helping the job seeker process and helping to find their dream jobs. The team has really bonded.

The executives and founders have done a great job of creating a culture that promotes unity. We have Simply Hired olympics, off-site events on a regular basis, bring in lunch catered every single Friday. So it is just non-stop fun and a really dynamic place to work.

Allen: Can you speak about the “Working Mother Approved” section of Simply Hired?
Julie: That was about a year ago that I came across the Working Mother list and they publish the Top 100 companies for working mothers. And so we felt very good about the process they have in place for selecting these companies. We wanted to help promote that because it was a great endorsement about the whole lifestyle that is emerging. We talked to them about creating a specialty filter on our site where people can search for jobs and they can click on Working Mother friendly companies and those jobs will show up. It was rapidly successful and our users liked it a lot. We have now setup other filters, such as for dog-friendly companies. We have a gay and lesbian feature and more coming really soon based on lifestyles.

Allen: Where do you see Simply Hired going in the next 1-2 years?
Julie: We are going to continue the path we are on and that is about helping to solve every pain point in the job seeking experience. And that is a mission that will take a little while to feel like we have accomplished it but we are taking steps every few months to solve another pain point and that’s what our passion is and will continue down that path until we feel we have conquered it.

Allen: Where do you see staffing services going in the next 1-2 years?
Julie: They are definitely going to need partners, whether that is Monster or Simply Hired, they will need partners to find that key talent and we will be there for them.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Julie. Thanks to Julie for participating and to you for reading and listening.

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