Simply Hired Could've Won the Vertical Job Search Battle If They Had Embraced This Single Strategy
The Simply Hired eulogy is making the rounds this week.
In case you missed it, the job search engine that launched around the same time as Indeed is calling it quits. Another news flash: Indeed won.
Industry pundits are blaming everything from declining Google search results to a crappy sales strategy to an outdated affiliate program for the demise. All are valid points.
However, the autopsy fails to look at a more interesting question: How could've Simply Hired outmaneuvered rivals like Indeed to win the war?
It's easy to say they could've kept pace with Indeed, simply copying their strategy. I mean, Indeed just copied Google right? The tougher exercise is asking how Simply Hired might've zagged when everyone else was zigging.
Flashback to 2007. The concept of vertical job search was a new one. (Hell, the concept of jobs online was still pretty new, but that's a different post.)
In addition to Simply Hired and Indeed, names like Jobster, Get The Job, Jobalot, Jobrapido and Juju were in a race for marketshare. More jobs meant more traffic, which meant more eyeballs. Content mattered then, just as it does now.
If you saw the trend, you believed the one who held the most, best content would win. This is why the fact 800-pound gorillas like Monster and CareerBuilder didn't squash the vertical search revolution before it even began is puzzling. Craigslist, to their credit, saw the danger and shut-off the engines' spiders early.
And therein lies the seed to how Simply Hired could've outflanked Indeed and won: Pay the content holders for exclusive rights to aggregate their content.
What if Simply Hired had gone to Craigslist in 2007, right after the spigot had been shut off, backed up the Brinks truck, and asked, "How much will it cost to access your job content exclusively?" The same conversation could've taken place with Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and others.
With exclusive rights to highly desirable job content, Simply Hired would've ended up being the market default for job seekers. "If you really want to search all the jobs, you have to go to Simply Hired. The others don't have Craigslist and Monster listings."
They could've locked down said content for 5-10 years, and I think the job boards and newspapers would've happily taken the money. Simply Hired had the money, and the boards apparently didn't see the vertical search engines as a threat at the time anyway.
In that 5-10 year period, Simply Hired would've built a strong moat around the market, and they would've had the time needed to aggregate the employers directly, weening themselves off job board content in the process.
Simply Hired spent money for real estate instead of content. They paid to have a "jobs" link on MySpace and they paid bloggers to promote openings. It was a perfectly good strategy at the time but one that is easily duplicatable.
We close the book on Simply Hired this month. It's an unfortunate end, but a familiar story nonetheless. Of the many job search engines that launched a decade ago, and in the years hence, only one really still matters.
Had Simply Hired embraced a different strategy 10 years ago, as outlined above, I believe it'd be another shutdown story we'd be telling now instead of theirs.
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