Simply Hired--Incredible Site for the U.S.A. Job Market

http://www.simplyhired.com

Currently aggregates listings for 5.3 million jobs. Refreshingly tailored toward the job-seeker. You can rate the jobs you find, and you can easily return to any job listing. The company's companion site, Simply Fired, is great for a laugh.

The site currently contains over five million jobs aggregated from many U.S. sources, including thousands of newspapers, 5,000 job bulletin boards, and over 200,000 companies—all conveniently indexed in a single place. It's a great place to start your search, especially if you're looking beyond your immediate environs—although the listings are only Stateside at present.

Of course, the most popular job sites remain Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, in that order—and they're certainly more visible. But while they have plenty of handy tools for job seekers, the three big players focus more on the companies that pay for their recruiting services than on job seekers. Check out the home pages of the top two, and you'll see that the most prominent sign-in buttons are for employers.

The search, filtering, and tracking capabilities are what you'll most appreciate about Simply Hired. I found the search facility, available on the clean opening page, to be simple yet powerful. You can filter the results based on criteria such as education level or amount of experience required; job type, such as contract work, full-time, and part-time; company rankings (Forbes 100 and Fortune 500, for example), and company size by number of employees or revenue. Heck—you can even seek out positions that are dog-friendly.

When you find results that interest you, the My Jobs dashboard lets you keep track of any offering, and it gives you a simple five-star rating system (much like PC Magazine's) allowing you—and only you—to get a quick, at-a-glance gut feeling about a particular job listing when you return to it, thus saving you the time of rereading the listing. You can also save search criteria and get e-mail alerts or even RSS feeds notifying you as soon as new jobs that fit your requirements appear on the site—options that are comparable to what's available via Monster's search agent.

Simply Hired is keen to establish partnerships, and its first big one was with LinkedIn, the career-networking site with about six million users. Once you've also joined LinkedIn, you gain access to mashups of the two sites. For instance, with a single click, a Who Do I Know? mashup lets you locate anyone in your LinkedIn network who works for a company with an opening that interests you. Other tools include Apply Now, Company Research, Map Jobs (which provides you with a Google Map), and Research Salary (a mashup with PayScale.com). The Apply Now feature will take you away from the Simply Hired site to whatever page the particular company uses for online applications.

No review of Simply Hired would be complete without at least a mention of its hilarious sister site, Simply Fired (www.simplyfired.com). Solace and humor are to be found there, including spoof videos of scenarios that have gotten people fired (or could get people fired) as well as testimonials and links to blogs, many of which might make you laugh—because as the site's tag line says, "If you don't laugh, you'll cry."

Davis D. Janowski
davis_janowski@ziffdavis.com