VerticalSearch.net

April 19, 2006 Update: SimplyHired Raises $13.5m from Fox Interactive Media

I last talked with Phil Carpenter when he was at SideStep. In January, Phil made the move from travel search to job search, landing at SimplyHired as VP of Marketing. Phil has been in the vertical search industry since the early days of SideStep, so he’s definitely one to watch.

Following is my interview with Phil and Kay Luo, Director of Marketing…

Can you lay out the online job search industry and where SimplyHired fits in?
The best known sites are the large job boards – CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Monster, etc. – but there are actually more than 5000 job boards online. Most of those companies are employer facing. When SimplyHired started, our approach was different. We wanted to be candidate facing and do the best job possible for the job seeker; any pain that the job seeker felt, we asked how you apply technology to solve that. It’s very much akin to the traveler focus of the travel search engines.

In addition to the large job boards, you have a ton of individual players like government agencies and large companies. The market is really fragmented. With so many different places that you can look for jobs, that search can be time consuming and overwhelming.

The big job boards are doing well with jobs at major corporations. But half the jobs available in the country are not available at large corporations, but rather at small to medium sized companies. And that information is widely dispersed. How do you find it? Craigslist, niche job boards, local papers, small employers, etc. There’s a huge long tail of jobs. Our desire is to help candidates see all of the jobs, to dig in and unearth opportunities that would be interesting to them at small and medium sized companies.

By searching a broader spectrum of jobs, we’re giving people more choice. We have 4.5m jobs in the database, which is 10x the size of the largest job board.

However, we don’t just think of ourselves as a job search engine, but a job search application. We’re layering on top of the job search data a lot of related functionality to help candidates find and act on the application. We slice and dice results in many ways, as a relevant search means different things to different people. We’ll help candidates find a job with a dog friendly company. We’ll help candidates research salary through our PayScale partnership. 90% of job listings don’t have salary information. We have a LinkedIn partnership as 50%+ of jobs are found through referrals. Google, for instance, is hard to get into. You should ask ‘who do I know who works there?’

In terms of acting upon the data, there’s a paradigm shift in terms of going beyond the one-click search. People are using filters because there’s too much information on a general search. You have to interact with the results to narrow it down.

We do a mash-up with Google maps where you can put in your address and see that a job is 2.1 miles away. We’re adding capabilities that let users magnify the value of basic information they see in a search. You can save jobs so you can add notes and there’s a dashboard to help you manage this information.

Job search is actually a really involved process – a 3-6month exercise for many people. Google is the In-N-Out burger of search. You grab your Double -Double, and you’re out. In [the job search] world, it’s much more involved, people come back multiple times as the stakes are higher.

Because of this, SimplyHired is less of a search company and more of an employment company. Search is the base, but we see good opportunities to add capabilities on top of that. We’ll supplement the base in valuable ways to solve the full assortment of pains the job seeker suffers from.

How do you get your listings? Do the companies like Monster and Yahoo HotJobs give you permission to crawl?
Some companies give us permission and others we just crawl. Search costs are not the issues – as opposed to travel. The number of sites we search is over 1000. We don’t disclose the number of direct feed relationships.

The job search market is really fragmented. For the job seeker, search is valuable because the market is so thinly spread with jobs everywhere. For Simply Hired, this means we’you’re not as beholden to any one player [compared to travel search companies].

How you get the data in this market is less important than what you do once you have it.

Back in October, Craigslist told Oodle to stop crawling its site – and part of the rationale was server load problems. This is similar to what Travelocity and Expedia say about the travel search engines. I found Craigslist listings on your site. What’s your relationship with the company?
We have a good relationship with Craigslist. Oodle is a special case as they had to crawl repeatedly which produced a legitimate load issue.

We want to be a good citizen. If you look at the interest of the [job boards and job search companies], they are very well aligned. If you’re large job board X, someone pays you $400 to post. It’s then your mission to get that job filled. Once the job gets posted, the job boards are eager to have supporters help them satisfy that customer. We’re sending [candidates] directly to the site.

Classifieds make up a good portion of revenues for newspapers so the publishing companies are not sitting by letting everyone just eat up their pie. The NYTimes took a stake in Indeed. Gannett/KnightRidder/Tribune own CareerBuilder. Are you a partner for the newspapers? A competitor?
The role we play for the newspapers is similar to the role we play for the large job boards. We’re showing a taste of information and then driving them to the source. We’re a lead generator. We’re not accepting individual listing.

How often do you refresh listings? I found a lot of jobs which didn’t exist anymore…
We make best efforts to minimize that. We don’t disclose [our refresh rate].

How do you make money? What is the business model?
There are multiple ways to make money. Advertising is an important part of the model, but the current advertising you see on the [side of the search results] is only the first pass. There are more ways to work advertising into the search experience. There are also other services that we can offer to job seekers from which we’ll make money.

Look at the kind of searches we’re getting - when someone is entering a job title and region, they are giving you an extraordinary amount of targeting information. We’re testing our own PPC network, and we have our own advertisers.

We see a move towards cost per action (CPA) in the industry. Right now you’re just putting up a job posting regardless of whether it gets filled or not. It’s very inefficient.

How do you market?
PR outreach. We’re the Google of jobs. When we show the product, everyone is impressed. SEO and PPC. Our sister site, SimplyFired which is focused on enabling people to share their employment woes. Guerilla marketing. Distribution through partners; we power LinkedIn’s additional jobs. Partners usually have premium listings and then we backfill.

You went from one vertical search company to another. How is this different? Same?
-This is a much more fragmented market than travel and as a result, there’s an even more intense need on the consumer side for a service like this.
-The underlying technology is different. The sites with which we work is built on the technology of today. There are no major search costs associated with [crawling].
-There are much more cordial relationships within the job search space. These companies are cooperating. It’s a symbiotic set of relationships as opposed to in travel search where there is much more quarreling in terms of who gets access, how much information is shared, etc. Cisco, Stanford University, Monster all want to fill the jobs we list. Our interests are very well aligned. That is a common theme that resonates throughout the space.
- Job search is a lot newer as it didn’t come to fruition until 3/2005. There’s a 5 year delta between travel search and job search.

Related Posts:
Travel Search Engines - Phil Carpenter - August 24, 2005
Vertical Search - Travel Search, Job Search, Shopping Search - March 10, 2006