simply hired Archive

Job aggregation service Simply Hired has announced the launch of a variety of international sites today. The list includes local job search sites for Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Brazil and the Netherlands. Simply Hired notes that they are indexing over five million jobs around the world. The idea is rather than having to go to job search sites, newspaper listings and internal company job boards, services like SimplyHired bring them all together in one place.

An interesting note is that their partnership with LinkedIn will allow local searchers to find connections at the companies they are interested in. This could provide job searchers with a leg up on the competition as the referral will come from an internal source if the internal connection is willing to pimp the applicant.

Also, check out our comparison of job aggregation services Simply Hired, Indeed and Jobster.

We covered the launch of the Job-a-matic platform from SimplyHired just about a year ago. The idea of Job-a-matic is to allow any publisher to easily create a job board on their site or blog. Some of the a-list bloggers use Job-a-matic including GigaOm and VentureBeat and we use SimplyHired on our sister site HTMLCenter. Typically SimplyHired takes 50% of earnings but also provides jobs from across the Internet as backfill so your board always appears full.

Today SimplyHired is announcing a distribution deal with GoDaddy that will allow any GoDaddy hosting customer to integrate a Job-a-matic job board into their site. "When Simply Hired approached us about offering their free Job-a-matic product to our hosting customers, it was an easy decision," said Vice-President of Technology Michael Chadwick. "Go Daddy provides a one-stop shop for individuals and businesses to easily establish an online presence. Using Go Daddy Hosting Connection, our customers can take their site to the next level by monetizing it and quickly adding relevant job content."

I can only hope that customers will be able to find the job board as they go through the checkout process. GoDaddy tries to upsell nearly 500 items when you check out. Distribution is key and this is a good move for SimplyHired.

Other job board providers include Indeed and JobThread. FYI, the CN Job Board is custom-made and leverages the Drupal CMS we use currently for tight integration.

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 :)

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.

Yesterday, SimplyHired launched a new service for web site publishers and blog authors called Job-a-matic. You can show jobs on your site/blog and get paid for some clicks and for any jobs purchased through your site. The revenue split is 30you/70sh for clicks and 50/50 for purchased jobs.

Several well known bloggers including Guy Kawasaki, John Battelle, Joel Cheesman and Jeff Jarvis have already joined the network. FeedBurner and TypePad will offer widgets for using the Job-a-matic option on sites in those networks.

Below you can listen to my discussion with Phil Carpenter, VP Marketing of SimplyHired. He will explain how the program works.

Phil is asking for user feedback. My first bit of feedback is regarding the payout. First, there is no information about the payout on the Learn More page. This should be added as soon as possible. Next, Phil notes that the payout is $500. I think this is a mistake. Smaller web sites will find it hard to sell jobs, and clicks paying 10 cents or so, will take forever to actually make the $500. Phil notes that it takes a while to get a payout from Amazon. Amazon actually pays out at $10 which is great for smaller sites.

That's really all the feedback I have so far. The team at SimplyHired continues to innovate a sector which has sat dormant for such a long time.

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After stopping by the SimplyHired party at the ad:tech conference, I had a chance to catch-up with Dion Lim, COO and Phil Carpenter, VP Marketing. You can also check out my interview with Julie Craft, Sr Director, Advertising and Sales.

We discussed the following topics:

• New things at SimplyHired
• Tie-in with News Corp. and MySpace – 1 million unique users going to MySpace jobs a month
• Stats on people who find a job from SimplyHired
• What happened if job boards turned off their feeds
• Duplication of jobs
• Patent application
• Inclusion of niche boards
• SimplyHired into Europe and Asia and issues involved with recruiting in other countries
• Resume posting product overview
• PPC ad system
• What's coming up for SimplyHired

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Overall, I really like the SimplyHired model. Their team really is quite dynamic and I think they really do a great job of saving the job hunter time. I remember searching the NY Times classifieds on Sundays for hours back in the early 90s. Then we moved onto the 'net with check multiple job sites. Now we have a tool which aggregates multiple job boards into one easy to use search. You can now use all that extra time to learn something new or enhance your current skills.