Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani (Part 8)

SM: You chose to serve the candidates in your approach, but the money is with the employers. What is the value proposition of your strategy?

GG: We recognized that employers would follow. We have tried o since the late summer of 2004 to move in that direction. We brought our service to the market in March of 2005. At that time the market had 2.5 million jobs, which was 8 times the size of the largest job boards.

SM: You collected job listings by crawling different websites?

GG: We did it by crawling everywhere. Now we have a service that is 20 times the size of the largest job boards. Nearly 80% of the jobs listed now are not crawled; they are fed to us because the sources are eager to get their jobs into SimplyHired.

SM: Is this international or domestic?

GG: We now have a presence in the UK, Canada, Australia, and we will have a growing presence in more markets in 2008 and 2009. During the past three years we have tried to come out with services we believe augment the candidate experience.

SM: Can you talk about that in more detail?

GG: The first thing we did was define SimplyHired as a site where a candidate can find more opportunities than anywhere else yet refine their search to find that needle in a haystack. Candidates have to be able to find their perfect job.

Second, we created and invested in various technologies for crawling. We do more processing and add more enrichment to the job dataset than any other place bar none. Our job dataset is more comprehensive and meaningful. We let users apply specific filters to increase the accuracy of their search. For example, a user can search for a job that is within 10 miles of their house, which requires 5 – 10 years of experience, and has been posted within the past 7 days. It is all about getting the candidate to the perfect job which means the candidate needs to identify the job characteristics, hence the reason we provide so many search characteristics.

After we launched in March of 2005 the very first partnership we made was with LinkedIn in April 2005. We trademarked a term “Who do I know?”, and we put it right below every search listing. If you hit that button, it will tell you who you know at that company via the LinkedIn network. LinkedIn has done a wonderful job of creating a meaningful dataset through structured data. Half of all hiring done today is via referrals. Even if SimplyHired does not get anything out of providing that referral, as long as we are providing a better experience for the candidate then it is beneficial for us overall.

SM: I see one disconnect. The job boards typically list jobs which are lower to mid-level. The high-level jobs, executive jobs, are buried inside of recruiter firms. LinkedIn was more successful in attracting higher level candidates and has less of the nurses or professional candidates.

GG: You make a great point. The job market has many segments, and at a high level when you look at the executive segment it is a very fair comment to say that the strength of a network like LinkedIn might be one segment versus the other. We do crawl all jobs, there are simply more of the low and midlevel jobs.

SM: My point is that in many cases the high level jobs are not listed.

GG: We know that it is very difficult to create an ideal solution. In our case it is important to just get started and be better than the alternative.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Mashing Together A Job Search Engine: SimplyHired CEO Gautam Godhwani
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