Simply Hired Violates Job Seeker Trust

   

Effective today, Simply Hired launches a pay-per-click advertising platform with over 1 million featured jobs … roughly 20% of their content.

   

Balancing the interests of employers, jobseekers and a for-profit business is always tough; but it’s never a good idea to mix pay-for-placement ads in with the organic search results. 

   

The search results at right (click for a larger image) are for a ‘Ruby Developer’ position.  Notice that the first two positions:

   

-          Do not include the word ‘Ruby’ in either the title or the highlighted text;

-          Are labeled as ‘featured’ in light gray text; and,

-          Are supposedly displayed in ‘best match first’ order.

   

Yet, the ads in position 3 and 4 are clearly better matches – both including Ruby Developer as the title, and both containing highlighted references to Ruby in their descriptive snippets.

   

Switching to ‘newest job first’ retains the two featured jobs in the first two positions, despite the fact that they are not the most recent.

   

Clearly, Simply Hired is moving featured jobs to the beginning of both sorts regardless of their true organic position; and with 20% of their content ‘featured’, I’m not sure their results qualify as organic search results any longer.

   

Now, if SH had a separate section on the page for featured ads, and made it clear that featured ads are not impacted by the sorting options, then everything would be cool.  In fact, Indeed.com does it just that way … the correct way.

   

Indeed and Simply Hired are otherwise close enough in coverage, accuracy and feature set, that this single difference in the handling of search results and featured ads is enough to decide between the two sites. 

   

Unless Simply Hired makes some changes, you have a better option … Indeed.

   

Comments

[Gautam Godhwani]

Bob, I can respect that you have a different point of view about the ideal interface, and thought that I'd provide some more insight into the decision we made at Simply Hired. We take our user experience and trust seriously, and are doing everything we can to preserve it.

Note that our Featured Jobs are...
- jobs that are part of the organic results set, but have been promoted to featured status
- only listed at the top and bottom of the page, not blended into the results
- marked as "Featured"

Certainly, you may prefer an interface that highlights these jobs, such as Google. However, note that on Google, an advertisement can have a substantially different type of content than the actual organic results (e.g. a search for "digital camera" will display advertisements for e-commerce sites at the top, but the organic search results that will highlight sites with content about digital cameras).

But on Simply Hired, even the "advertisement" is simply a part of the organic results – it’s actually a job, which has been promoted to featured status. So since all jobs are part of our organic results set, we decided to show them under one interface, but to mark Featured Jobs as "Featured".

I think you make a valid point regarding relevancy. We have just launched this offering, and we'll continue to improve the relevancy algorithm. As always, we welcome your feedback.

[Bob Wilson]

Hi Gautam,

Thanks very much for the additional information ... an excellent response.

I agree with you that the primary issue is targeting. If the featured ads were very precise, then talent seekers and job seekers would both benefit.

When relevancy is low ... something I've been saying since I started blogging ... then promoting ads, perhaps from the tail to the head, based on a paid-placement model, just compounds the relevancy problem. In the end, all parties lose.

Site usability is one of my passions, and I still believe that promoted jobs should live outside the sortable organic results. After all, what does a 'sort by date' mean if the top results are not the most current? We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.

Bottom line though, Simply Hired is a top participant in the labor exchange field, and I wish you all the best as you move forward.

Bob :-)

[Lyss]

indeed.com is a great job search tool. It's usualy the first place I go when I need to find something employment-related.

[Bob Wilson]

Hi Lyss. Thanks for posting feedback.

Yes, Indeed is a great job search tool. You won't go wrong with them.

Bob