SimplyHired 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.

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.

With AOL’s acquisition of Bebo yesterday, and now discussion of a possible KickApps acquisition by AOL, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some other content candidates for AOL acquisition. If AOL is going to get serious about stepping back into the major leagues, they need more top notch content sites. All of these acquisition ideas would work well with Userplane, AIM, ICQ and Bebo, all AOL-owned companies.

CafeMom

This NY-based startup is targeted at moms and would be an excellent complement for AOL’s branded Web sites. CafeMom is currently serving 100 million pageviews and an average of 200 pages per user per month. This would make a great place for Platform-A and could be an extension for the Bebo "engagement marketing" platform. (our coverage)

Dogster/Catster

A niche social network for barking and meowing, Dogster and Catster could fit into the AOL branded sites as well. An acquisition of Dogster and Catster by AOL would give both sites new distribution opportunities along with a new advertising partner. (our coverage)

TripAdvisor

I am guessing that a decent percentage of TripAdvisor users are already AOL customers, either as dial-up, broadband or Web site visitors. TripAdvisor is currently owned by Expedia but I think the match would be better with AOL — could replace the AOL Travel site. The TripAdvisor network serves pages to 60 million unique visitors a month and includes 8 web sites including my favorite, SeatGuru. (our coverage)

SimplyHired

It seems in the time since I started CN there’s been chatter here and there about SimplyHired being acquired by someone. It’s a better acquisition target than going after a job site as SimplyHired would give AOL the best of both worlds: all the job listings from the major job boards plus the ability to enhance listings to generate even more revenue. The publisher job board option would give AOL a potential "in" to publishers to push Platform A and other potential partnerships. (our coverage)

Which services do you think would be a good fit for AOL?

Editor’s note: KickApps is a sponsor on our sister site, HTMLCenter.

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 :)