While I’ve talked to SimplyHired a number of times, the company is definitely not the only innovative job search company. In fact, Indeed was the first of the new crop of job search companies to launch back in November 2004. Incredible to think that this market is just a year and a half old.
I often talk of how early we are in the online shopping game, but it’s clear that the job search market is even more green. With job boards like Monster (did you know the parent company, Monster Worldwide is a $7B company?) and Hotjobs as the established guard, it’s going to take years to see a dramatic shift towards job search engines. But this new form of classifieds search is every bit as disruptive to the job boards as meta travel search engines are to the OTAs.
Indeed first appeared on my radar screen on August 8, 2005 when the New York Times made an investment in the company. The classifieds market had already been under seige for years from the wunderkind Craigslist. I viewed the New York Times as an established old media company hedging its bets on the future of classifieds by investing in a search engine. As the Times’ Martin Nisenholtz said “The Times Company has strong help-wanted franchises in print and online, and we believe it is important to invest in new technologies and services in this advertising category.”
Fast forward almost a year later, and Indeed listings are now backfilling the NYTimes’ employment listings. Through its Publisher Program, the company offers an affiliate program and makes its listings available to any website through an API. Last week, Indeed took the ‘beta’ off of it’s pay per click job listings program.
Indeed’s CEO is no stranger to the job market having co-founded Jobsinthemoney, the leading jobsite dedicated to finance professionals, which won Forbes Best Finance jobsite before being acquired in late 2003. Paul holds an MBA from INSEAD business school as well as Masters degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
I caught up with Indeed’s CEO, Paul Forster last month for an introduction to the company…
Background…
The job search market is very fragmented. There are 1000s of different places to search which makes it very difficult for seekers to do a comprehensive search. Indeed saves people time, enables people to find unique jobs, and also to find sources of jobs that they normally wouldn’t have heard of. We’ve put a lot of work into the search algorithm. We’ve also developed a number of tools to make finding a job easier – advanced search, email alerts, RSS feeds, various plug-ins, and we recently added new filters [see the left margin of Indeed’s search results].
From the employer perspective, we provide very targeted traffic comprised of job seekers. If a job seeker applies to the 10 best fitting jobs on Indeed.com, which is a comprehensive search, they will be a better match than the 10 best fitting jobs on a job board with a limited database of listings. Indeed benefits job seekers as they can access more relevant jobs, and employers as they receive better matched candidates.
The natural results are unpaid and ranked by relevance. We sell ads through our own PPC service which we backfill with Google AdSense. We have sponsored jobs [shaded in blue at the top and bottom of the search results page].
History…
The business was started in 2004 and our beta launched in November of that year. We understand the industry – the job market is huge. It’s the biggest single classified segment and classifieds are moving online. At the same time, it’s very fragmented.
Vision…
We put the job seeker first. The job board model is oriented towards companies. It puts the interest of the company first. That’s where the search engine approach comes in. We’re giving [job seekers] a comprehensive job search experience. We have millions of jobs from thousands of sites. By giving job seekers the best experience, we’re ultimately giving companies a great stream of candidates.
How do you get your listings?
We include jobs in one of two ways: by direct feeds of jobs from job publishers and by indexing publicly available web pages.
We don’t disclose what the split is. As publishers of jobs become more accustomed to working with this [model] they will provide a feed and many already do. We’re going to stay as a search engine, not become a job board. At the same time, we’re adding new tools all the time.
How often do you refresh your listings?
It’s continuous and therefore pretty fresh. Indeed keeps jobs up 30 days.
How many unique jobs do you have? [Editor’s Note: I’m trying to figure out how to compare all the players – not sure if # of jobs is the correct standard…]
The number of new jobs (in last 7 days) is on homepage (as of 5/15/06, there were 1,172,514 new jobs). When looking at other job search companies, the total number of jobs can be skewed by keeping listings on the site longer or listing duplicates. It’s tough to include jobs accurately. Some competitors mark jobs with a current date, but it’s an old job. There are also some low quality sites out there which primarily list other engine’s jobs. We have spam filters to [combat this].
A lot of your listings come from Monster/CareerBuilder. What’s your relationship with the big job boards? What’s next?
We’re not setting ourselves up as opposition to the job boards. We get contacted everyday by job boards who want their jobs included [in Indeed’s index]. Job boards have good brands. We drive a lot of traffic to job boards which is valuable to them.
When job seekers discover what we’re doing, it’s valuable for them. Our business model makes a lot of sense - we’re driving targeted traffic to job boards and companies. It’s the early days. We’re going to do a lot more. We’re becoming more and more comprehensive. We’re adding tools. We’re improving the search algorithm. We’ve developed a publisher program where anyone can integrate job search very easily into their own site.
What does the New York Times investment mean?
It’s hard for a large old company to do things in house. Traditional media companies are taking advantage of young entrepreneurial companies. By investing in Indeed, the New York Times takes a stake in an emerging approach to classifieds.
Separately, we’re powering job search on About [another NYTimes company] and backfilling jobs on NYTimes.com and Boston.com.
Pay per click (PPC) will become more and more important. Pay for performance is a powerful model on the web and it will be true for classifieds, too.
How about TheLadders, LinkedIn, etc.? I think that all these concepts have a role in the future…
I don’t think there will be one single model that will obviate. It’s not like LinkedIn in won’t exist because vertical search is successful. Out model isn’t the only one that will succeed, but our model is important.
What do I need to think about as I dig into the job search vertical?
Nobody has really dug into the question of comprehensiveness and relevancy. That’s the most important thing for the user.
The data will become ubiquitous, so what you do with the data becomes important. It’s very easy to create a site with a lot of data, but you have to ask about freshness, comprehensiveness, and relevance.
Tools are also important – you want to look at all jobs at a particular company, maps of where jobs are located, etc. Some of those things are interesting, but the core is comprehensiveness, relevance, and user experience.
May 16th, 2006 at 1:53 am
C’mon where are the tough questions comparing them to SimplyHired? I wanna see some blood!