Wednesday, March 31, 2010

At Five-year Mark, Job Search Engines Are a Success

A week ago SimplyHired celebrated its fifth birthday. That alone is a momentous event, considering how many recruitment-focused startups have come and gone in that time.

More significant than just surviving, SimplyHired and its counterpart Indeed.com (which launched five months earlier in 2004, but came out of beta almost exactly five years ago today) have thrived. Starting with zero traffic, both are now in the top 10 of career sites in the U.S. Indeed ranked 4th in the Nielsen report last year, behind Monster.

SimplyHired, sixth in the report, has probably already moved up. If by some chance it hasn’t already, yesterday’s announcement that it was becoming the job channel for Huffington Post almost guarantees it.

Huff Po, as it’s known, is getting 26.4 million monthly visitors, some 21.6 million of them from the U.S. Between the jobs channel SimplyHired will now power and the widgets the site will deploy to distribute contextually related job ads throughout its sections, the bump in traffic and visibility will be significant.

Traffic comes at a price. SimplyHired, which issued a press release announcing the deal, didn’t say what the revenue arrangements are. Rarely are financial details announced. Traffic deals, though, don’t come cheap. A few years ago, CareerBuilder snatched a deal with AOL from Monster, paying nine figures over four years.

The fact that SimplyHired can make a deal at all is a testament to the acceptance of the job search engines by the recruiting industry. Both SimplyHired and Indeed launched as totally free sites; jobs were gathered from elsewhere, indexed, and made searchable by job seekers.

As convenient as these sites were for job seekers, the question at the time and for long after launch was: How do you make money with a free model? I remember SimplyHired founder and CEO Gautam Godhwani and Indeed co-founder and CEO Paul Forster having fundamentally the same approach.

Forster went with a Google AdWords approach. Godhwani has Google AdWords on the site today. However, even with the kinds of traffic volume both sites get today, you don’t get rich (unless you are Google) purely on selling contextual ad placements.

Both CEOs told me back in 2005 that they would offer pay-per-click job ads in premium positions. Today, both sites do.

The marketing strategies of both sites run on parallel tracks. Through a combination of financial incentives and free widgets that are attractive to small publishers, both SimplyHired and Indeed have built impressive networks. Servicing these low-volume sites, many of which have highly specialized readerships, is possible because of the apps that make everything self-service.

In exchange for sharing some of the revenue with bloggers, professional organizations, publishers, and the like, both SimplyHired and Indeed can offer highly targeted ad placements presented to audiences of passive users.

Without too much effort, a publisher can even take a completely customized feed of jobs and have an instant job board offering dozens, hundreds or thousands of opportunities, depending on the level of targeting.

Way back at launch and for a time after, many of us wondered how long the major job boards would permit the search engines to aggregate their listings and redistribute them. That was a worry to the search engines themselves; Craigslist did shut them out and still does.

Of even bigger concern was Google’s intentions. The search dominator launched its own classifieds business, calling it Google Base. Clearly in its sights, or so many of us believe, was the multi-billion dollar recruitment business. Like many of Google’s toe-dipping ventures, Base floundered and its traffic tanked.

One well-placed insider at one of the leading job boards told me at the time they were watching how the search engines would handle the listings. Google, being the 800-pound gorilla, was the bigger worry.

Being small, SimplyHired and Indeed just didn’t have enough of a footprint to have much of an impact. And there wasn’t any financial hit to the majors, who were busier battling each other anyway. The added visibility SimplyHired and Indeed brought to their listings was a welcome addition to the traffic count, slight though it was at first. Today, that added distribution is a factor for which the job boards get the credit; to apply or read a complete listing from an off-site source, job seekers must go there.

In the unlikely event that Monster and CareerBuilder were now to shut off their spigots, there would be an impact, but no crisis. So many employers are providing job feeds directly that job seekers might hardly notice the loss. Of course, neither search engine wants that to happen, one reason (there may be others) neither has gotten into the resume business. That keeps job seekers engaged with the job boards and recruiters paying to search them.

So today, on the fifth anniversary of job search engines, they have come to occupy an important position in recruitment advertising. The job seeker traffic testifies to their usefulness, and employers have responded by including them in their ad spend. Both sites are profitable, according to their CEOs, and have been for sometime.

It will be interesting to see how they evolve over the next five years.

Original Post


Monday, March 29, 2010

How LinkedIn will fire up your career

By Jessi Hempel

If you need a job, or just want a better one, here's a number that will give you hope: 50,000. That's how many people the giant consulting firm Accenture plans to hire this year. Yes, actual jobs, with pay. It's looking for telecom consultants, finance experts, software specialists, and many more. You could be one of them -- but will Accenture find you?

To pick these hires the old-fashioned way, the firm would rely on headhunters, employee referrals, and job boards. But the game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, you'd better be on the web.

To put a sharper point on it: If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: "This is the future of recruiting for our company."

Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you're serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory -- and more useful -- than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.

More than 60 million members have logged on to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February. They include your customers. Your colleagues. Your competitors. Your boss. And being on LinkedIn puts you in the company of people with impressive credentials: The average member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000. More than a quarter are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives: Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500) found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008.

The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its members already have jobs. A cadre of happily employed people use it to research clients before sales calls, ask their connections for advice, and read up on where former colleagues are landing gigs.

In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're shopping themselves around. This population is more valuable to recruiters as well. While online job boards like Monster.com focus on showcasing active job hunters, very often the most talented and sought-after recruits are those currently employed. Headhunters have a name for people like these: passive candidates. The $8 billion recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn changes that. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see.

For a generation of professionals trained to cloak their contacts at all costs, this transparency is counterintuitive. So far most conversations about how to use social networks professionally have focused on what not to do: Don't share drunken photos on Facebook. Don't use Twitter to brag about playing hooky from the office.

Read The Rest Of The Article + Video

Sunday, March 28, 2010

How I use Twitter in my Job at Microsoft

How I use Twitter in my Job at Microsoft

As a Windows Client (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Native, XNA, Surface) community guy on Scott Hanselman's team at Microsoft, I am constantly on Twitter. I've found twitter to be pretty indispensible for keeping up with the community, and for keeping myself sane while working from home.
First, a little on my working setup


I have three displays and two computers that I use daily. I also have my touch tablet that I use if I need to do some touch work, or I am preparing to go on the road. Due to the shape of my desk, I have one 24" display on my left, dedicated to my Microsoft PC (quad core, 8gig machine), A 23" display right in front of me, as my home PC's main display, and then an old 20" display above the 23" display, dedicated primarily to Twitter or to reference material for whatever chapter/blog/article I am currently writing. When I move my desk, I will have more displays (preferably a 30 and a couple 24s) :) I use Input Director to share my keyboard and mouse between my main PC and my Microsoft PC.

Here's a picture from last year.



My Microsoft PC typically has my MS email open, some internal sites, and often times, Premiere Pro encoding some video content.
Twitter Columns, Groups, and Searches

Every day, I check my direct messages and my mentions for any conversations I should reply to. I'll also check the latest in my "all friends" feed, but won't make an attempt to really catch up with overnight stuff. If it's below the fold, I pretty much write it off and only deal with new items as they come in (I often attempt to do the same with email, but that doesn't go over well ). These are my Twitter in-boxes.

So far, my columns (from left to right are)

* Direct Messages
* All Friends
* Mentions

I then have a few different searches and groups that I keep open and check at a few points throughout the day. From Left to Right (currently) they are:
Search or Group Use
Group: Extended Microsoft Team This has all my team mates, plus some key product group folks.
Search: windows client stuff This is a search for keywords like "wpf" and "windows forms" (it's a long search). I use this to find out what people are doing, what new blog posts have come out, and where folks are running into snags.
I'll often reply to interesting tweets here. In fact, you'll sometimes see a blog post or three from me where I have found an interesting challenge in a tweet in this search, and then decided to write a quick post about how to solve the problem or otherwise help the person out.

In addition to all the blogs I subscribe to, I often mine this search when putting together the weekly Windows Client Developer Roundup.
Search: c64 This is a search for several commodore 64 keywords. You'd be amazed at how many daily tweets pop up in this search.

Mostly this is a fun search, but I also use it to check to see if folks are saying anything about the C64 emulator I wrote.
Group: Local This is a group of local tweeps, including influentials, friends, former coworkers at AIS, and DEs in the area. I use this to keep up with current local events and local friends.
Group: Fun A group of several fun folks I follow, like Darth Vader, OMGFacts, alyankovic etc. Little to no business value here, but good for off-topic stuff, and for the types of things I include in the "Fun" section in the Windows Client Developer Roundup
Search: Pete Brown Vanity search. This is a search for my name, common variations on it, and my domain names. I use this to find out what folks are saying about me (or any of the other zillions of Pete Browns) even if I'm not actually mentioned. It also helps me when someone response to @PeteBrown instead of @Pete_Brown

BTW, if you like beer, follow @petebrownbeer :)
Group: WPF at Microsoft This is a group I set up for all the WPF product team folks that are on twitter. Good for additional news about the products, although I don't typically find out new things here. I'd hope I already know about it by the time it shows up on Twitter :)



I've been on Twitter now since 2007, and it has pretty much replaced my public IM usage (I still use Office Communicator within Microsoft for private chat). I use Twitter to communicate with people, share things I find interesting, and keep up with the goings-on in the community. It has helped reduce the frequency of short single-link posts on my blog (I simply share the link on Twitter now) as well.

One final use for twitter is making folks aware of new blog posts I put out. I don't believe Twitter should be used as a replacement for RSS. However, I feel it's ok to mention your blog posts as long as that's not the full extent of your conversation on Twitter.

Read the rest of the Original Article

Friday, March 26, 2010

13 Best Firefox Job Search Add-ons

How to use this guide

All the add-ons mentioned here can be found in the Best Job Search Add-ons collection I created on mozilla.org.

Search plugins

Search plugins add a specific search engine to your browser’s search box.

Indeed Job Search: search Indeed.com, one of the biggest job search engines in the USA.

Jobtweet.de – Twitter Job Search engine (English version): search Twitter for job openings from English-speaking countries. Other versions of this add-on search for jobs in Russian, French and German.

TwitterJobSearch: Search Twitter for job listings.

CharityJOB: search for fundraising jobs, charity jobs, and third sector jobs in the UK.

DoNanza Freelance Job Search: search the “world’s biggest search engine for online freelance jobs.”

oDesk Jobs: “from within your Firefox search bar, simply type a query and browse through matching oDesk assignments.” Another freelance job search add-on.

Curriculum for Professionals: “search directly from your browser the exact job post you are looking for.” (Brazil)

Jobexpress.pl : search job listings on this Polish job board. (Poland)

Zarplata.ru – instant search: search job offers from top Russian companies. (Russia)

Super add-on tip: use the terrific Add to Search Bar add-on so you can search any website directly from Firefox’s search box.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Forget the netbook

"Forget the netbook. It’s a slow, clunky piece of junk. Do I want to look like the guy who couldn’t afford a real computer or the guy who went to the future and brought back a device that’s as cool as I imagine I am?"

Neil Young, CEO and cofounder, ngmoco: