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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

The discussion is about 20 minutes and you can either listen to it using the player below or download the mp3.

But before we begin, let's take a brief trip back in time. All hands in the capsule! The time is now 1995 and Allen has just graduated from college. The Big 6 didn't take me with three of them telling me that I was "too computer focused for our firm." HA! Anyway, when I returned to NYC to look for an accounting position, the routine was the same that was a ritual for many people before me. Sunday morning you grabbed the New York Times, a scissors, my notebook, two highlighters, a stack of good bond and envelopes and a large cup of coffee. The process then began from there. Positions which were fax-only got blue highlighter, those that were mail-only got yellow highlighter. You had to think about when to fax so that your resume would appear on the top on Monday morning! And then you had to print the envelopes out one by one, print the resumes, and get to the post office first thing on Monday. Phew. And then there was the daily ritual of going from agency to agency with each one telling me they had the job for me.

Fast forward to today. Fancy bond is meaningless, you want a resume that contains the key terms that a recruiter will search on. Fax? What's that? And last Sunday, I checked the NYT to see what their jobs section looks like today. It is about 5-8% as thick as it was 12 years ago. I guess some still rely on the paper to get the word out.

Probably the biggest trend today is that we have moved from a push to a pull jobs market online. With the new crop of niche job boards coming into the spotlight, these boards require you to submit your information rather than the old standard of posting a resume and letting the employers come to you.

The current major players

In my opinion there are three sites which still dominate when the general public discusses job boards. Those are Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.
Pros: They are the biggest and the majority of employers will have an account with each. Registering with these sites is almost required when you are looking for a new job. Large companies still use these sites to find resumes and most employment agencies use them as well. And these 3 sites are also utilized by most of the newspapers in the U.S.
Cons: These sites are like Microsoft in the early '90s. No need to change because of their dominance. I haven't really seen any innovation from these companies in years. Using their systems is clunky and riddled with advertisements. For example, as an MBA graduate, do I really need to see adverts for a non-accredited trade school? Half of the time I never know if the submission went through because of all of the advertising.

The rest of the larger players

These sites include ComputerJobs and Jobster.
Pros: ComputerJobs could be considered a niche site but is really bigger than just basic computer positions. ComputerJobs uses a local site process which is good for finding a position in your local area. Back in the late '90s, ComputerJobs was the sh**. Jobster has just announced a plan to remove all costs with posting jobs.
Cons: When the cost was removed to post jobs on Jobster, so begins the spam. Cost is usually a way to avoid tons of spam. I have requested information from Jobster regarding the spam but have not heard back. My concerns with ComputerJobs is that back in the day the computer recruiting firms used their site a lot to find qualified applicants. There were days where I would have 2-3 calls from my ComputerJobs resume. With fewer computer recruiting firms around today, can the site survive?

The aggregators

The biggest aggregator currently available is SimplyHired. I have interviewed them here and here.
Pros: Post your resume here and get it on all of the sites they partner with (which includes the three listed under major players above). Search one site for jobs on the major sites plus 1000s of corporate sites. RSS Feeds by SimplyHired are great.
Cons: I can't really think of many negatives except that you are relying on the data to be current and correct in SimplyHired's system. And the other concern is that they do not aggregate the niche sites noted below.

Joe made a good point in the comments that I left out Indeed.com from the aggregators. According to Hitwise (Jan 2007), Indeed has 1.89% of the vertical market share where SimplyHired has 0.32% of the market share. My apologies for leaving Indeed off the list!

Niche sites

As I have discussed before, there is no lack for niche job sites. These job boards are here to stay because they focus on a specific area or niche and are not (currently) plagued with the overwhelming advertising that the major players are. We have created a Job Hub which aggregates many of the top niche job sites.
Pros: In the web area, two of them stand out above the rest. Krop and Crunchboard have a lot of fresh jobs, Krop has new jobs daily, Crunchboard about 2-3x a week. RSS Feeds make these sites easy to view from anywhere.
Cons: These niche sites require you to push your resume/CV to the firms. Unlike the sites above where companies can search for you, here you must search for them.

Final Summary

I know I left out the corporate web sites. Naturally you can search on any company on their own web site. But that is very slow going if you want to search on 100 or more companies. I think the job market online is really starting to pick up the pace. With the new niche sites starting to take a stronghold over their areas, the major players are going to have to start to innovate again. We have basically reached Jobs 2.0. The major players will need to innovate to stay at the front while sites like Jobster and SimplyHired begin to eat their lunch. Actually, I take that back. They have already started to eat their lunch.