SimplyHired Job-a-Matic Syndication Strategy

By Greg Sterling | January 24, 2007

SimplyHired (and its competitors Indeed, among a couple others like Oodle) promise to take the pain and inefficiency out of searching for a job by aggregating more jobs than anybody else.

But the job site brands, CareerBuilder, Monster and a newly invigorated Hotjobs (owned by Y!), are still the top job-seeker destinations (not to mention Craigslist).

Fox Interactive Media is a significant investor in SimplyHired, which has in turn been integrated into MySpace.

But, generally speaking, something in the Jobs market (so to speak) hasn’t been working very well, despite the ubiquity of jobs search (and related tools) for employers and job seekers. That recognition led every high-traffic blogger and their cousin to create a jobs board: Michael Arrington, Matt Marshall at VentueBeat and GigaOm, among others.

SimplyHired has now responded with something inspired: Job-a-matic.

It’s a job listings syndication strategy that solves a number of problems for them and others. Publishers (and bloggers) put a module on their sites, which (when clicked) takes you to a white label jobs board that has the look and feel of the site. It essentially is a back end for your own jobs board, because you can solicit listings directly as well. Here’s more on how it works, including the revenue sharing.

It helps push SimplyHired’s listings — in a contextually relevant way — out to niche communities, builds distribution and offers a monetization opportunity for bloggers and other publishers different from AdSense and its competitive equivalents. But it can also co-exist with AdSense because of recent AdSense policy changes.

While this is a terrific idea, others could quickly try and mimic it. In fact, Edegio has simultaneously done essentially the same thing (via TechCrunch). Expect Indeed to respond to this in some way.

The classifieds space remains very hot with competition apparently intensifying. In the end, however, trust (also think brand) will trump other propositions for both the job seeker and employer.

Advertisement: ProNet Advertising Blog on Experiences in Online Marketing