Having indexed more than five million jobs worldwide, Simply Hired’s country-specific destination websites in Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Brazil now enable job seekers to search from the leading job boards, content websites, newspapers, and company career pages in each country—providing a simple online job search experience. Through its international partnership with LinkedIn, Simply Hired’s local websites will also allow job seekers to discover connections at companies, providing them the inside track on the hiring process. Without requiring membership, Simply Hired immediately shows returning users which new listings have been added since their last visit and offers an advanced search option to return job listings that match specific criteria, all in the users’ native language.
“Simply Hired is proud to offer localized job search engines in Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Australia,” said Sachin Shah, Director of International, Simply Hired. “Our recent expansion to Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Brazil is a testament of our commitment to helping job seekers around the world.”
“As Simply Hired continues to grow and expand globally, localizing our job search services is crucial to ensuring successful market entry,” said Gautam Godhwani, Co-founder and CEO, Simply Hired. “Localized Simply Hired sites in the U.S., Australia, Canada, India, the U.K., Germany, Spain and France are already providing job seekers in these countries the best opportunity possible to discover their dream job. By expanding our services to Italy, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Brazil, Simply Hired is demonstrating a strong commitment to the worldwide job search market.”
What Simply Hired is doing is worth digging deeper.
Let's do a search:
I logged onto their site today and conducted a very simple search for "recruiter" under the keyword search prompt, pulling up 98 results. The engine produced roles posted on Stelfox's web site, IrishJobs, LoadzaJobs, Gumtree and also Recruit Ireland's to name but a few. Very nice! However, one thing I was disssappointed with was the number of duplicate jobs that were aggregated which is typically the major failings of all aggregators that are not smart enough to allow for semantic or intelligent search features. But still, I was impressed. What I also liked was the advanced search feature which allows Boolean syntax.
A simple search for - recruiter (waterford OR cork) NOT cpl - pulled up a very focused 12 results which allows me extra functionality to pin point the type of roles I am searching for and in some cases gives me the ability to reduce the duplications myself with even more targeted strings.
Very interestingly in the results page that it turned back you see a little LinkedIn icon that prompts you for access to your account. This is the first time that I have seen LinkedIn integration with a jobs search engine and it is an extremely clever way to find contacts that might be able to give you information from withn the company the job exists.
What I particularly like:
1. It's clever technology: Aggregaton by its nature is efficient and that's why search engine aggregators like Dogpile have been holding their own and doing well. The basic premsise of one location to go and get your jobs from still is a powerful pulling point. Most job seekers don't care what job board they visit to get their jobs. There is very little loyalty involved. If they could go to one location to get them all they probably would. I know I would. What is particularly impressive is when you return to the site it remembers your previous searches and in a simple dashboard like feature at the front of the site refreshes your search and tells you how many matches it has and provides then a list of RSS feeds for each search you made for you to subscribe to. Very well thought UI concept with the job seeker very firmly being taught about as being in the driving seat of their own search.
2. Clever partnership deals. Simply Hired is only a 4 year old company but already it is in the top75 web sites in the US for a reason. It powers 30,000 local job portals and is part of a network of more than 5,000 sites. They also power the international job channel for MySpace U.K. and supplement LinkedIn’s job board with millions of job listings from Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, India, France, Germany and Spain. They have also created partnerships with BusinessWeek, US News & World Report, Workforce Management, CNN Money and most recently, The Washington Post. They will try replicate this platform abroad. The LinkedIn and MySpace deals are good news for the company. Watch out for more in the future on their various country platforms. Expect to see integration with Wer-Kennet-Wen or Xing in Germany and the likes of Orkut in Brazil.
Check out Lucian Beebe, Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, walks through the LinkedIn API implementation on the SimplyHired site.
3. Google Monetisation functionality is both at the top, side and bottom of all searches. While some Irish job boards have integrated this feature and done an "ok" job at doing so they should pay attention to the prevalence and positioning of the ads on Simply Hired platform.
Simply Hired's entry into Ireland for me raises the entire discussion again that has been raging in the US for quite some time on the vaildity of "job aggregators" - but this time brings the topic to our own door steps. Just a few short years ago sales reps for some of the major job boards in the US were outraged at aggregators bold enough to scrape postings without permission from job boards or corporate career sites and some companies like Craig's list went as far as to ban them from spidering their site entirely.Others believe they are a positive force in the recruitment industry that won't be going away any time soon and if used properly can help with your search engine optimisatoin strategies and get more people to your own site. I wonder what the Irish recruitment industry thinks?
While Simply Hired have not entered Ireland with trumpets blowing and huge marketing budgets at the ready it will be interesting to see if they do decide to splash out with some advertising and if so how and when and whether or not job seekers in large numbers begin to avail of their service in any kind of sizeable numbers.
This is a very good example of recruitment innovation in the job board market that is pushing the boundaries of the industry in a new direction. It will be very interesting to watch where Simply Hired goes from here, especially with their integration and apps strategy. I'll be watching closely.
