SimplyHired Heads Downunder
October 29, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
Those of us in the online recruitment industry have been waiting the arrival of a major global player in the jobs aggregation space into Australia.
Simply Hired the Mountain View, CA-based jobs service has made the plunge. Not simply stopping with Australia they have also launched:
Canada (www.SimplyHired.ca), the United Kingdom (www.SimplyHired.co.uk), Australia (www.SimplyHired.com.au) and India (www.SimplyHired.co.in).
The aggregation market has seen a lot of small fish come and go, resulting in its general lack of success. The idea’s a good one, though, and perhaps a larger player will be able to support this enterprise better than a smaller one. The reason for my hypothesis is simply centered on the financial backing a bigger enterprise might have to promote the product. Aggregation does not yield massive revenue without massive traffic. The difficulty is that, without promotion (and therefore funding), massive traffic is unlikely to occur.
I had a play around on their site. No Seek results show.. any reason why?
Hi Benjamin
You’ve posed an interesting question.
Seek is very protective over its job ad content and has asked not to be scraped by verticle search engines. The aggregators would have to go to the true job ad owners individually to get permission to scrape – a time consuming task.
Perhaps Carey Eaton could enhance our understanding of this issue.
Welcome back Geoff.
Having been at News Limited during the 2006 investment in SimplyHired it would be inappropriate for me to comment I think.
Understandable, Carey.
Can I provoke you, though, to make a comment on Seek being scraped? Is Seek’s policy going to be upheld into the future?
If you’re asking whether SEEK is ever going to hand over its job inventories to another job site to help them establish a brand, I’d say that would be very unlikely.
Many aggregators approach job boards with the idea that somehow – as an unheard-of brand – they are going to do a better job of delivering traffic to a job board than the job board can do itself.
In the case of SEEK, we have a very strong unaided brand awareness and the Neilsen numbers attest that we do the best job of generating jobseeker traffic in the markets in which we operate.
It follows that there simply isn’t a value proposition for us to work with aggregators.
[...] been well covered by my blogger fellows Thorsten (German), Cheezhead (US), Steven Fowler (UK) and Geoff Jennings [...]
Nothing speaks louder than dollars.
Comment from Davidand from the old blog site:
Carey – I haven’t heard an aggregator (unheard of or not) say they can “…do a better job of delivering traffic to a job board..”, but I have heard plenty say that they can help deliver more traffic to client ads. For a job board like Seek, an aggregator is surely just another (legitimate) distribution channel? Don’t you owe it to your clients to get as much traffic to their ads as possible? And does your “protectionist” strategy simply deny your clients maximum exposure for their ads?