10 ms·
Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
- abhi3 10y agoIs it just me or are several more funded startups shutting down in 2016?
- mdorazio 10y agoI think you mean "more than usual". I feel like it's more that the media is reporting on failing startups at a higher rate this year since the deflation of the startup bubble is a popular topic.
- justizin 10y agoSimply Hired's founder self-funded, FYI, I don't think there was ever any VC money involved. At least when I worked for them circa 2010 that was the case. Hope all the smart folks I worked with there land safely.
- fintler 10y agoSimply Hired, founded in 2004 and based in Sunnyvale, had raised just over $34 million in funding from investors that include Dave McClure, Foundation Capital, Guy Kawasaki, Fox, IDG Ventures and Ronald Conway.
- justizin 10y agoI stand corrected. I guess they burned a lot of the founder's money first. ;d
- bostonpete 10y agoIt seems like your memory from 2010 isn't even quite right. According to this article, they were taking investments at least since 2006... http://techcrunch.com/2006/04/18/simply-hired-takes-135m-from-fox-and-foundation-capital/ http://techcrunch.com/2006/04/18/simply-hired-takes-135m-fro...
- throwaway59511 10y agoCrunchbase shows them having taken an A round in '04 and several times since then [1]. Their E round wasn't long before my interview there [2]. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simply-hired#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/simply-hired#/entity [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810217
- ryanSrich 10y agoPerceived doom. In reality there's a slight uptick in closures, but it's mostly business as usual. Incredibly stupid ideas are still getting funded by the hour.
- rhizome 10y agoI think there's probably an uptick in closures, and the doomwatch media is pointing their attention at them, but I think a big part of it is that there have been so many, uh, "thinly-premised" companies that for whatever reason didn't fold over the past few-to-several years. That is, I think a lot of closures will be able to be boiled down to "what took so long?"
- deprave 10y agoIt's unlikely that the business climate has changed much for startups. I doubt the success/failure rates are identical to what they were one, five, or ten years ago. What has changed is media coverage, skepticism, and average skill level of "users" and maybe the frequency with which things happen.
- patmcguire 10y agoCould also be the lack of launches in the years before. Good luck finding a used 2009 car of any model, good luck finding a startup founded in 2002.
- eganist 10y ago"part-acquisition" So in conclusion, someone bought up the scraps at rock-bottom prices just before a potential bankruptcy. Ouch. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. They brought on a former Yahoo VP as CEO four years ago. As the article and one of the comments therein pointed out: it seems they didn't have much in the way of new technological or algorithmic advantages to build on and didn't have much in the way of direction-setting from the newly installed executive staff.
- matmann2001 10y agoThey were acquired ...by the bank.
- choward 10y agoTo be sold to patent trolls.
- throwaway99af 10y agoNo patents
- yuhong 10y agoNot that it is a good idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.
- Pyxl101 10y agoI would be more interested to see the opposite: limited salary and extremely generous stock options, vesting at each time period in the future at a price that's the company's current price projected forward with the average expected stock market returns, plus some discount. (So the company needs to grow greater than the market for the CEO's options to have value)
- 10y ago
- us0r 10y agoI'd love to know the real story. I'm not a UI/UX expert but it seems pretty clear they didn't put too much into user experience. I'm asked for my email before even showing me a job. Then I go search for another keyword and I'm given results on the other side of the country. Clicking any of those results I have to go click again to "Read More" (basically see the job description).
- ecaron 10y ago<guess type="unresearched"> I'd wager that the investors started to evaluate the actual traffic sources and quality of the candidates going through their system. Upon investigating, although the traffic numbers were high they weren't legit. So rather than trying to right the ship, it didn't have a high enough ROI to save so they just sank it. </guess> Another article with a lot of good data is http://recruitingheadlines.com/simplyhired-shutdown-latest-news-industry-reacts/ http://recruitingheadlines.com/simplyhired-shutdown-latest-n..., and I think the Quantcast stat is worth a lot more consideration than the piece gives.
- AJ007 10y agoWe had to block their domain in display campaigns because it was sending a lot of bad traffic. Have not had to do that with any other "real" job/career site.
- vthallam 10y agoCurious on what is the website you are redirecting the traffic to? Is it a job board/ATS/a just company job board?
- AJ007 10y agoAnother job search engine. A lot of traffic so not a statistical blip. Usually it's only the viral/buzz domains and mobile apps that need to be blocked outright.
- burn11335577 10y agosome day, but by then it will be irrelevant
- vthallam 10y agoThis was destined to happen i guess! SimplyHired has no USP, scrapers which can massively scrape jobs and SEO which gets users,that's about it. No clear direction and competing with Indeed, which has better tech must have been hard for them. Also, I wonder with $34 million in funding, why they didn't launch any products to cater the users/companies.
- x0x0 10y agoYeah, but Indeed seems to be making plenty of money: $434m rev in 2014, $300m 1/2 year rev in 2015! I'm really curious what went wrong... http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-2014-revenue-434-million-71-year-over-year-increase/ http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-2014-revenue-434-millio... http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-year-2015-revenue-300-3-million-57-year-over-year-increase/ http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-year-2015-revenue-...
- greglindahl 10y agoIf they were overly-dependent on SEO... their Alexa rank sure seems to have fallen a lot since the middle of 2015.
- vthallam 10y agoAs i see, Indeed has better scrapers and SEO for a start. It established itself as a market leader in this business, also built simple products like letting companies directly post jobs, making it easy to apply from mobile(they acquired mobolt for this) and also working on Indeed Premium( a hired clone). With that kind of traffic, if simplyhired had launched any decent products to help recruiters, they would have easily been counting a lot of $$$$. A stale product is the reason for its death.
- AJ007 10y agoSEO + they did a really good job on their partner program. In simpler terms a shitload of free Google traffic along with a safer, diversified stream which cash flows very nicely. Both things that basically act as expanding moats the longer they are maintained.
- downandout 10y agoIt seems that with 30M monthly users, they could have somehow made enough money to keep things going, even if they had to lay some people off. Why on earth do you just shut down a site that has 1M valuable active users every day? Simply slapping some Adsense on a site with this kind of traffic would have generated enough to keep the doors open. Even if they are getting acquired, this seems like an insane move for the new owner.
- clamprecht 10y agoMaybe opportunity cost.
- yeukhon 10y agoYeah. Indeed.com has the worst user experience and yet it is still running strong, simply because Indeed.com is everywhere!
- clamprecht 10y agoI'd sincerely love to hear how you would improve Indeed.com. I no longer work there, but I did previously, and I still care about their UI. If you have real suggestions, I'll make sure someone at Indeed sees your comments.
- SerLava 10y agoI'll throw a couple. I like Indeed's UX but there's always something to improve. -Indeed isn't responsive, SimplyHired is. This isn't just a mobile thing, I like to snap two windows side by side on one monitor when using these sites. Indeed forces horizontal scroll at like 940px which is pretty huge. The leftmost and rightmost columns could squeeze a lot more than they do, and they could switch to something minimal below that point. -Remember the Google SERP redesign, when they removed the underlines? SimplyHired looks a bit like the old version, and Indeed looks like the current version. The old one was better. Easier to scan. Less wasted space. -"My Recent Searches" pushes down the filters, but it's basically a rehash of the information in the filters. Also, if you uncheck a salary range, and check another one, the Recent Searches ends up showing you that you looked at salary-unspecified jobs in that town. So it's wasting space to remind me of a search that: A) Isn't useful B) Is already shown up in the search bar C) I never actually looked at (my browser did, I didn't)
- throwaway59511 10y agoThrowaway to share my experience with them: I applied in mid-2014 to a software eng position based on encouragement from a recruiter. I went to two onsites with five people in total, each of which passed me to the next round. They had me come in for a third onsite(!) to meet with CEO James Beriker and some head of engineering. I had admitted to being let go for underperformance to the position I held two jobs ago (was doing fine at my current). I had explained this to each past interviewer who asked. Beriker just seemed to want to have fun with it, asking "well why the heck should I hire someone who's been fired?" He looked at my resume and said, "so, what were you doing between these positions ... oh right, that must have been how long it took you to find a job". Whenever I asked for clarification on his other questions, he cryptically dismissed it with, "just, whatever you interpret that to mean". I don't imagine that they're going to get a steady stream of good candidates[1] if they're going to put you through all that and still veto you for something they should have known very early on. I ended up working somewhere else and have gotten a total 35% raise since starting. I also had an interviewer who did the thing where they get flabbergasted and insistent that you did it wrong because you use the opposite convention from the "official" solution, until you walk through it. [1] In one interview, I derived the optimal solution to the Dutch Flag Problem despite not having seen the problem before.
- eganist 10y agoHah, I didn't expect my implied criticism (elsewhere in this thread) of a Yahoo VP being hired as their CEO to be so damningly validated by personal experience.
- throwaway59511 10y agoI don't understand. What about Yahoo VPs would lead you to expect the experience I had?
- 808statetaway 10y agoGood rule of thumb is that people from Yahoo or Sun are extremely nonproductive and tend to spend most of their time preparing powerpoint presentations for internal use.
- simplyfired 10y agoSimply Fired.
- johnnyg 10y agoIMHO VC is tightening, the job flow is slowing and those two trends were forecast to last longer than their funding sources were willing to stick it out. Next up to bat are those whose client base is other 90%+ funded startups? However, never up to bat are start ups producing cash or with the prospects of doing so. I don't think this is going to be a nuclear winter event, but that the gap between "making it" and "not making it" will grow wider. Those that are on the bubble are the bubble that'll burst, and sama will still win his bet. :)
- jeffmould 10y agoAs one of the partners for the past two years this came as somewhat of a shock, although not entirely surprising. About two weeks ago they had a "maintenance" window to supposedly make changes to their entire infrastructure to enhance performance, etc.. so to completely throw all that out the window a month later is a little surprising. In addition, this was literally a short notice. I actually never received a notice from them. I saw the TechCrunch article earlier today and reached out to one of my contacts who confirmed. For once I am glad I read TechCrunch today. From a partner perspective, their API is pretty good and easy to use, although their support has gotten really bad over the last year. I don't think they have many working on the support team and I have had tickets go weeks without even an acknowledgement. Only after opening multiple tickets or updating the ticket constantly do I get a response. One thing I did notice though is that they did not seem to be developing or improving much over the last year. Their partner interface can be a little confusing if you need to do more than reporting. About a year ago I was told there were some upgrades coming to the interface and API to make it easier and that they were enabling real-time reporting. Neither of which came about. When I asked again I was told they were working to make their job postings more "mobile friendly", whatever that means exactly. We initially chose SimplyHired over others because of some of their API functionality (i.e. you can search by O*NET code for jobs) and their revenue share was higher than Indeed. For the last 6-7 months though their revenue share seems to have taken a significant hit and not sure what is happening. I tried to get some more details from the partner director, but she didn't seem to know who or what was going on with the acquisition. I would have to agree with others that it appears to be a "fire sale" or acqui-hire, as they are not offering their partners any alternatives. In fact the only help I was offered was dumping reports or data so we could go with another partner. Luckily we didn't have clients with jobs posted through their site so we don't have to deal with refunding job postings which could be a nightmare in a short period of time.
- aak 10y agoI worked in an office below them for a few years. They seemed nice, thoughtful, ambitious, and hard-working, much like most folks I've met who choose to work at startups. I feel sad to see any startup shut down since I know so many people like them; hell, that could easily have been me. I also feel sad to see the commenters here dance on their graves. I would prefer to celebrate the fact that they lived and battled for 10+ years, much longer than most startups. Kudos to them.
- syngrog66 10y agoMost of us in this industry should think about the consequences of this case: Employer/Interviewer: assume the other party is an idiot/faker Candidate/Engineer: if the other party is an asshole, I don't want to work for them, because I don't want them in my daily life.
- ThomPete 10y ago"As one of the bigger recruiting companies, the company gets about 30 million visitors each month and claims to search some 6 million jobs across 700,000 employers. In comparison, Monster claimed in Q1 it had some 50,000 employers in its database, and does not disclose MAUs. Indeed.com says is has more than 180 million monthly active visitors." And yet they apparently can't make enough money to sustain themselves and need funding. Perhaps it shows just how careful one have to be to put together the right metrics to measure your success by.
- mlvljr 10y agoIs everyone... simply fired?
- chrisbennet 10y agoI tried Simple Hired for job hunting years ago but back then they didn't handle searches for "C++" (WTF?). I tried it again today and they still don't. Here are the first 6 results I got just now searching for "C++" (50% error rate): Simply Hired: Pediatric General Physician, Full Stack Software Engineer, QA Testing Analyst, Surgical Technician, Entry Level Developer, Specialist Software Design Eng, Director of Medical Staff Services Compare this to Indeed's results for the same search (0% errors): Software Developer/C++ and SQL, Sr Computer Developer - C++/Java/UNIX, C++ Developer, Software Development Engineer 2, Software Engineer, Software Engineering Specialist
- ozi 10y agoThis is somewhat sad... Out of all the aggregators, SimplyHired sent the highest quality traffic compared to Juju, Indeed, Jobs2Careers, etc.