Union Square + NYT invest Indeed.com
"In our due diligence, we talked to these employers. They don’t really want to list their jobs in newspapers, job boards, or anywhere other than their website because that’s where they want to collect the resumes. What employers want is the ability to buy traffic to their website, and direct it to the jobs they most want to fill. And they want to buy that traffic on a paid for performance basis, not a fixed price basis. That what job search does for employers. It’s really simple. Job search delivers traffic to employer’s websites more efficiently than any other method. The value proposition for job seekers is equally strong. As Indeed says in its tag line “one search. all jobs.” In the old model, a job seeker needed to scour all the major job boards, the local classifieds, craigslist, and the web sites of the companies they are interested in working for. That is because nobody had a comprehensive list of the open jobs. Now, it’s much simpler. The job seekers just go to Indeed.com, they do a search, and they get all the jobs that are listed on the Internet, no matter where they are listed. But on top of that, they get advanced search functionality, the ability to store searches, turn them into RSS feeds, and be alerted when new jobs show up in the index that meet their criteria. This is a revolution for the job seeker and the traffic growth that Indeed has been seeing since launching in beta last November indicates that job seekers love the idea of job search. So Indeed has a strong value proposition for both job seekers and employers. That’s critical. But on top of that, there is something really interesting going on with paid job search. One of the central tenets of Web 2.0 is the notion of syndication of content and commerce. Indeed facilitates that in a big way for the existing job classified providers. Because Indeed and some of the other job search services “play nice”, job boards and other job publishers have been supportive of the efforts of these services.
It will also be interesting to watch Yahoo! to see if the leaders in traditional web search can do vertical search as well as the companies who are focused exclusively on vertical search. The requirements of job search or travel search or some other form of vertical search require different crawlers, different frequency, different results alogorithms, etc. So Yahoo!'s entrance into job search is going to be interesting on multiple dimensions. Another really valuable asset that the job search players own is an index of all the jobs that are available at any time. Indeed keeps jobs in its index for 30 days and currently has over 3.5 million jobs, a figure that is growing daily as new sources are added. That compares to Simply Hired, one of Indeed’s competitors, which keeps jobs in its index for 45 days which boosts their total jobs number. But whatever the policy of keeping jobs in the index, Indeed and Simply Hired have way more jobs available to search than the job boards. The largest job board has less than 500,000 jobs in the latest 30 day period. Longtime readers know that I have been running an Indeed Jobroll on the right sidebar of this blog for about six months. Anyone can do that by visiting Indeed and doing an advanced search. The results of that search (in my case venture capital and web technology jobs in New York City) will be displayed in a job roll that can be run on any website or blog. The jobroll is a good example of the way that the Indeed index can be syndicated to provide value to publishers and other operators of web services. In a Web 2.0 world, apps are built on top of apps, and at its core, Indeed is a web service. We look forward to lots of innovation in this area over time."
posted by redbarren at 9:41 AM
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