Feeding The Hippo
August 26, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
Here’s a sign of the times. I spotted this question from an employer in the PageUp People forum.
We are considering using Hippo.com as an advertising medium to attract candidates for our call centre. (along with other mediums).
Has anyone had any experience with them, if so would appreciate your feedback?
It got me thinking. A little flush of excitement rushed to my cheeks as I considered how intrinsic the internet is now to the way we communicate.
Of course, folks have always chatted to one another about their satisfaction or otherwise with products and services they’ve used. But I can’t recall a time in the history of humanity when we’ve chatted to a reader or listener who is unknown to us. Not only that, we are then prepared to take the advice of that unknown entity and, presumably, act on it.
Prior to sources of information such as Hippo, a person interested in their service would have had to ask someone they knew had used the service, or they would have had to read some form of advertising propaganda published by the company.
Of course this form of “word-of-mouth” raises all sorts of questions about the reliability of respondents. They may have agendas around promoting the service, or not promoting it to keep it for themselves. None the less, it is interesting that we are willing to disregard these pitfalls in favor of gathering info.
Anyways. Enough philosophising. For those of you unfamiliar with Hippo, I thought I’d provide you with a few facts.
A quick check on the site shows:
- close to 200 jobs nationally.
- a focus on part-time/casual jobs aimed at young people .
- a large % of jobs advertised are for the hospitality industry.
- ranked number 56th on the latest Hitwise Australia rankings with 0.18% market share. (Seek ranked 1st and has 26.25%).
- $90 per job. (Seek $180+GST)
Thanks for the awesome blog about Hippo. We have been doing a lot to build Hippo from the ground up only 12 months ago, which mind you is not an easy task considering the likes of our competition.
But as a team (a family) at Hippo we have all been extremely proud to hit and achieve the results we have.
For a little more information, we are now reaching almost 100K full registered and profiled candidates in our database with over 80% of those under the age of 25.
We receive almost 100K visitors to the site monthly now and have been growing consistently. This is truly an amazing feet for a 12 month old business.
We are backed by Jeff and Janine Allis (Boost Juice), Mark Besen, and most recently DMG Radio Australia who own and operate both Nova and Vega radio stations nationally and we are the first business outside of radio that this amazing company has ever bought a stake in.
After our first 12 months of operations we are currently expanding our team (presently at 13) and opened a Sydney office last week to help all our amazing clients up there and further assist in the Brisbane markets, whilst we have just taken reigns on a 24 seat call centre over in Adelaide which we will fill over the next >12 months providing telephone technical and sales support and a grounding for our Adelaide and Perth teams.
We have recently appointed Tom Culver (ex Seek) as our National Sales Manager, so if anyone wants to talk business and how we can help you, please feel free to give he or I a call tom.culver@hippo.com.au or 1300 788 874.
Let’s talk product, in a number of months we will be launching some amazing new products which will help revolutionise the industry’s thinking. Our inhouse product dev team has been working their way to the grave for you guys and I’m sure we can make you happy. The aim: making the processes MORE efficient and relevant for you when trying to hire young staff.
Got any other product suggestions you want to add to our pile, or want us to integrate with you then let us know… support@hippo.com.au
Thanks again for your support. Hope to hear from you soon!!!
Great post and commentary on the social networking phenomenon. I think what you say is fairly accurate, and the only thing that I would like to add to it as that whilst we may not necessarily know the person with whom we are asking the question, we know ENOUGH about them. I think this is pertinent, particularly in the case you have cited, as the Original Poster (OP) knew that she was in a Talent Management social networking site. If that wasn’t enough for her, she can quickly scan the people who respond to her post and discover where they work, their titles and much more other relevant information. As such, the reliability and credibility of the information is significantly increased. Naturally, there is always a risk associated with any information we obtain from the internet (as any university lecturer reading material referenced from wikipedia will no doubt confirm) but this is weighed against the timeliness of the feedback and the trust the OP has for the social networking site itself.
The rise and rise of social media and social networking is placing the power back in the hands of people who can now obtain the information that they want; not what corporations want them to have.
Keep up the great work.
Sounds like everything is ‘amazing’ down at Hippo.