
Simply Hired is shutting down June 26 - us0r
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/31/simply-hired-is-shutting-down-june-26-reportedly-as-part-of-an-acquisition/
======
throwaway59511
Throwaway 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.

~~~
therealgimli
there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive,
rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." One way to
spot it is if they respond in a contrary way to everything and generally try
to pick on you to find chinks in your armor.

the first time I experienced it I was pretty shaken up.

either that or the person you spoke with is just an asshole.

~~~
JoblessWonder
When I was in my early-mid twenties and trying to make the internal jump from
top-tier Help Desk to SysAdmin I had a Director who did this.

The earlier interviews were fine. I was fairly green, but I seemed to get the
basics of the position, was very eager to learn, and had the recommendation of
my (large) department's management up to VP. They asked me technical questions
which I did pretty well on. Then the Director comes in and immediately starts
blasting my resume, my lack of real-world experience, asked why I was wasting
his time and literally questioned whether I was worthy of being on the Help
Desk at all.

I was shaken to my core. I spent the next three days questioning my abilities
and feeling like I was letting the company down somehow. On the fourth day
someone told me that this was his "interview style" and he was doing it to
"stress test" interviewees. At that point I was pretty thrilled I didn't get
the job and left the company shortly after for an entry-level SysAdmin job. I
couldn't believe he would lay into a coworker (even a very subordinate one in
a different department) like that without at least telling them why at the
end.

I'm still shaken up by that interview to this day. Technical interviews scare
the shit out of me.

~~~
caminante
Staying calm and speaking during confrontations is a learnable skill. I humbly
recommend reading the book Crucial Conversations, if you haven't read it, then
practicing the techniques.

I tell my "underlings" to breathe (with their diaphragm), to take their time,
and to carry their voice.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-
Stakes-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-
Second/dp/0071771328/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464747772&sr=8-1&keywords=crucial+conversations)

~~~
chris_wot
Yeah, but another valuable skill is knowing that if you are treated this badly
in an interview that even if you really want the job, sometimes it's best to
walk away.

~~~
Mendenhall
I would probably politely ask the person if they were acting like a clown as
an interview technique or if they were in fact an clown. No need to bother
with disrespectful people.

------
eganist
"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
They _were_ acquired ...by the bank.

~~~
choward
To be sold to patent trolls.

~~~
throwaway99af
No patents

------
jeffmould
As 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.

------
us0r
I'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).

~~~
AJ007
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.

~~~
vthallam
Curious on what is the website you are redirecting the traffic to? Is it a job
board/ATS/a just company job board?

~~~
AJ007
Another 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.

------
aak
I 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.

------
chrisbennet
I 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

------
ThomPete
"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.

------
downandout
It 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.

~~~
yeukhon
Yeah. Indeed.com has the worst user experience and yet it is still running
strong, simply because Indeed.com is everywhere!

~~~
adevine
(Disclosure - I'm friends with some folks at Indeed.) I'm also curious to what
you dislike about the UX. Indeed certainly isn't going to win any beauty
contests, but I think they have excellent laser focus on exactly what they
want to do: the site is _very_ fast, simple, and has a minimal set of features
that are useful without a bunch of extra BS.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
I know I had to Greasemonkey the site up to get search parameters I wanted
like the ability to retain a large number of results per page (100 is the cap)
without having to go through advanced search every time, and doing a large
regional search by filtering states I didn't want to move to and blacklisted
companies from the results rather than screw around with the limited 100 mile
radius.

~~~
patmcguire
You are not the typical user. (I say this with awe, not disrespect).

------
vthallam
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.

~~~
x0x0
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-2014-revenue-434-million-71-year-
over-year-increase/)

[http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-
year-2015-revenue-...](http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-
year-2015-revenue-300-3-million-57-year-over-year-increase/)

~~~
vthallam
As 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
SEO + 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.

------
johnnyg
IMHO

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. :)

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syngrog66
Most 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.

------
ozi
This is somewhat sad... Out of all the aggregators, SimplyHired sent the
highest quality traffic compared to Juju, Indeed, Jobs2Careers, etc.

------
abhi3
Is it just me or are several more funded startups shutting down in 2016?

~~~
justizin
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.

~~~
fintler

        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.

~~~
justizin
I stand corrected. I guess they burned a lot of the founder's money first. ;d

~~~
bostonpete
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...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/04/18/simply-hired-
takes-135m-from-fox-and-foundation-capital/)

