This 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.
Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
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Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#12This 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.
Yeah, 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-millio...
http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-year-2015-revenue-...
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply 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.
I stand corrected. I guess they burned a lot of the founder's money first. ;d
It 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-fro...
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#14It 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.
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#15Is it just me or are several more funded startups shutting down in 2016?
I 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?"
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#16It 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…
Maybe opportunity cost.
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#17I'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).
We 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.
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#18Throwaway 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.
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#19Is it just me or are several more funded startups shutting down in 2016?
Simply 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.
Crunchbase 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
Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26
#20Simply Fired.