By Kimberly Chin
In the vast ocean of jobs, one job engine seeks to give applicants more control: SimplyHired.com. This internet job engine, a relatively new company started in March 2005, by internet entrepreneur Gautam Godhwani who says his aim is to make the job search better.
The competition is tough for this new kid-on-the-block. The internet job-search industry has existed for over a decade producing tough competitors like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com. These job engines have an average of half a million jobs in their horde. SimplyHired.com offers a whopping 5 million jobs, which offers 10 times as many jobs as their competitors.
The site hits the core audience of ages 18 to 40. They tend to do well with the younger demographic through MySpace. Simplyhired.com joined forces with MySpace on June 12 of this year.
"We literally get millions of searches through MySpace," said Phil Carpenter, the Marketing Vice President of SimplyHired.com. The visitors that they receive through SimplyHired or through MySpace have massed to a million and a half people per month.
The site is easy to navigate because its features are straight-forward and to the point. It is as part of its title suggests: simple. It enables job searchers to type in a desired career such as nurse and the location of where you want to work and your selection will list in order of relevance to your search, much like the typical search engine. Pop-ups and spam are minimal if there is any at all which allows you to go straight into what you want to see rather than having to click close at all the pop-up windows all the time.
Because this is a relatively new site, it does not offer the same features as its older competitors. It does not offer you an online "resume builder" which enables you to 'build' your own resume online with assistance though the company claims that the feature is in development. Monster.com extends its efforts to students who are looking for schools, especially online schools that offer degrees online and even tools to help pay for school like loans and scholarships.
Part of what makes SimplyHired.com strive to be unique from their competitors, however, is their job filters. Job filters are a way in which users can narrow down their choices by select options that the site provides in assistance.
"We're trying to make it easier to filter choices that suit our users best," says Carpenter. "If you're looking for a job that sympathizes with a working mom or is dog-friendly or is environmentally conscious, we've got just the job for you" says Carpenter.
A helpful feature on this site is called LinkedIn, which is a professional networking site that allows users to keep track of their professional networks. Similar to sites like RateMyProfessor.com, LinkedIn are workers from the jobs telling people about the job, their co-workers and their nice or not-so-nice bosses. "Half of the jobs found are through personal connections," says Carpenter. "When you see people who you know you can connect to people from inside. Social networking is powerful," Carpenter adds.
SimplyHired.com is gearing itself toward college students. One way it looks to do that is to offer aid to college students who need part-time work, especially during the holidays. The site offers hundreds of thousands of part-time jobs. "It's not easy pulling these searches together from all over," remarks Carpenter, "but we try to put as many choices in front of you as we can."
In an interview, Carpenter said, "The big thing now is how to help our users develop and work with their resume and distribute it to boards." A handy feature in their site is that at one shot, one can post their resume to many job boards at a time for free.
Many sites require that one posts up their resume at each job board one-by-one but SimplyHired is one of the first to have this posting server feature.
"This site is perfect for college students and beginning a career for it helps those people [who] don't have all those 'contacts' immediately," says Carpenter. "This search engine helps you find those contacts and networks that you would not have found by yourself or normally."
In essence, this site is a great guide that brings any new job seeker into the career world with poise and grace. "Basically, we make it easier to find the job that you love," he adds.