Simply Hired is shutting down June 26 | Hacker News Reader

Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

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168 pointsus0r103 comments

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.

Hah, 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.

I don't understand. What about Yahoo VPs would lead you to expect the experience I had?

Good 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.

In my experience, the deadwood at Sun actually became deadwood at Oracle; most of the folks who left Sun (disclosure: includes me) were the ones who were drawn to Sun first and foremost by its mission, and since leaving they have gone on to interesting things elsewhere. So while there are certainly companies that are red flags for me, Sun isn't one of them -- and I say this as someone who knows Sun's failings better than most...

The purchase was 6+ years ago, and the deadwood is still there?

Absolutely! It is, after all, deadwood -- and given that it's broadly resistant to Oracle's management-by-asphyxiation, it will likely be there for quite some time to come...

Can confirm, although the asphyxiation often comes from a level or two up.

What do you mean by "Oracle's management-by-asphyxiation"?

And is it that Oracle has such marketplace strength that it can get away with holding the deadwood? I had heard that Oracle was a very competitive place.

"Too big to fail" market attitude, I guess.

"Too big to fail" usually involves outsiders (government) propping up companies. (Think GM or Bank of America) I don't think the government is propping up Oracle.

Deadwood manages to stay, unnoticed by management, for decades. Most companies of a size has plenty, the body-shops (EDS etc) seem to consist of mainly deadwood.

True - if the deadwood can still be billed out, it lasts.

A lot of the deadwood is management :-)

Sad, Scott McNealy was reputed to have banned Powerpoints in 1997 for pretty much that reason.

He was at Yahoo for barely a year and a half.

Looks like he was bought in as part of the Dapper acquisition: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesberiker

Why did you say you were fired for underperformance? Why didn't you say it was a bad fit? Usually, that's the root cause.

A smart interviewer doesn't need that to be wordsmithed. I would follow up by asking some questions about what it was about the position or culture or company that didn't work out well.

so, count on a smart interviewer because if the interviewer is not top notch, you don't want the job? that's throwing your future to the wind.

Another reason I wouldn't not tell the truth is maybe the interviewer knows my ex-colleagues.

It also shows courage to fess up to getting fired. As long as there's a good story around it, and some learnings, silicon valley is generally forgiving of short tenures.

It's not about lying, but constructing a narrative that paints the facts in a favorable light. Just saying you were fired for underperforming gives you no room to construct a less negative narrative.

That's what politicians do.

Because a) that is how it was represented to me, albeit with very high standards, and b) I don't feel comfortable massaging the truth like that. If and when I go into detail I can explain things that I think go in and against my favor.

Also, mathattack's answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mathattack

Being fired lost much of its stigma in highly intellectual professions. Often, it has to do with disagreements over certain business/technical decisions, rather than incompetence.

I have seen great people fired by terrible managers.

As an interviewer, I appreciate the honesty/brevity, and if the explanation for being fired is reasonable enough, it needn't be a huge red flag.

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.

They're an asshole either way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRtBvo9grLw

Did he call it "extreme negative feedback"?

> there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure."

Sounds like wannabes trying to imitate Admiral Rickover's interview style for the Navy's nuclear-propulsion program [0]. Forty-plus years on I can still recite my interview with the Kindly Old Gentleman [sic] practically verbatim.

[0] E.g., http://the-military-guide.com/sea-story-the-admiral-rickover...

Sidenote: Rickover is the reason we don't use Thorium reactors today. So sorry you had to interact with him.

What a character. His famous Columbia University speech from '82 (excerpts: http://govleaders.org/rickover.htm ) contains a quite a bit of wisdom that, whatever his flaws may be, is still quite poignant, valid, and something which people in program management and government circles should internalize.

The word "controversial" is used a lot with respect to Rickover, but that word is so clichéd today that virtually anyone that gets things done can be so labeled. However, Rickover truly seems to deserve that categorization. Beyond the Wikipedia article and "Rickover: Controversy and Genius", are there any other sources you and dctoedt would recommend to learn more about him?

Fanboyism toward Steve Jobs causes me to reflexively cringe because of the extent to which the ends were viewed as justifying the means in his management philosophy. Not to mention something approaching a sadistic streak. It would seem that a similar lens should apply toward Rickover.

i recall a chapter in Jimmy Carter's biography in which he summarises his interview with Admiral Rickover. According to President Carter (a Navy Lt at the time of the interview, i believe) during the interview, Adm Rickover asked him if, while he was a cadet at the Naval Academy, he had always done his best--that was literally the question. Carter's reply was something like "no sir, quite often but not always" In response, Rickover turns his chair around to signal the end of the interview.

If you were to compile a list of "bad ways to conduct an interview", this would be near the top of the list. Sure, exceptions can be made for a later stage of a sales interview process after first impressions have been made, especially if it's a role play. But if "copes well with rude managers" is a hiring criteria for software developers... well they probably have the option for working for a company that doesn't see that as an essential skill.

Senior execs that do this belong a long way from the interview process (and probably a long way from a senior exec role, because if they haven't figured out that interviews are a two-way process and unnecessary rudeness isn't a good first impression to leave they're not really management material)

This is how you end up with organizations where arguing loudly and making personal attacks are part of your culture.

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.

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...

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.

Good point

...and that's in the book! ;-)

edit: I think the key is that there's a dominant technique, regardless of whether you're getting trolled.

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.

Good book recommendation but my personal reaction if I ever encountered this during an interview would simply be standing up and excusing myself due to the lack of "cultural fit". Sure sometimes you need a job but compromising during job interviews is a pretty bad thing imo. You'll spend a good chunk of your time at a place, just walk if it smells funny.

Agreed, and that's why it pays to have some fuck-you money set aside, so that you can survive a few more weeks while looking for another job.

IT is so pervasive now, there is almost always another job.

It seems pretty bad to do this on an internal transfer.

Yeah... that was what really got me. I could see doing it and then at the end being like, "Ok, here's what the deal is. I came at you like this because this job is high stress. When things go down, we lose millions of dollars. If you can't handle that type of pressure, you won't succeed here. [Insert meaningless compliment about having great potential or something if you really feel like not being an asshole, leave it out if you do.] However, it seems like you might not be a great fit for this position at this time."

Or... at least e-mail the internal candidates afterwards (there were 3 of us, none of us got the job) and let us know why. Or tell our managers and let them tell us. Something besides beating us down and letting us flap in the wind.

This always threw me in interviews. I've worked in retail, as a medical tech with patient interaction, as phone support, as teaching assistants... and I'm able to get a reasonable level of rapport going. So to go to an interview where we build up some rapport and then the interviewer just turns suddenly hostile, that really throws me, because people just don't do that in the real world. I know better by now because I'm aware of this stupid 'trick'.

It has to be the worst way of detecting "how does this person deal with stress?". It's so artificial.

> because people just don't do that in the real world

well, they do, but basically only in crappy interview situations.

There is an enormous irony in a Recruiting SaaS company being so bad at recruiting.

It epitomizes the industry.

In a sense it hits all industries. Accenture would put in HR and ERP systems for companies all across the world, but their own were notoriously bad. Microsoft was infamous for patchwork internal IT. Investment banks are notorious for weak internal financial controls. We've all seen doctors who smoke or abuse drugs.

>gotten a total 35% raise since starting

Relatively meaningless percentage if you don't state over what time period. One could ballpark the minimum %/time.

Couple of comments,

It was rare that the CEO would reject people, but it happened occasionally, much to the interviewers delight \s. Sometimes he just wanted to 'leave his mark' I guess.

I actually doubt that the 'flabbergasted' response was an act.

It isn't typical for them to have multiple separate on-site sessions for non-management/director position. They were tossing you around trying to see if you could fit anywhere. I'm sorry you had to go through that.

"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.

They were acquired ...by the bank.

To be sold to patent trolls.

No patents

Not 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.

I 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)

That's the model of a lot of financial firms, it appears to lead to very short-term, high-risk strategies, and financial engineering to boost the share price at certain points in time

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.

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).

<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-n..., and I think the Quantcast stat is worth a lot more consideration than the piece gives.

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.

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

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.

some day, but by then it will be irrelevant

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.

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

"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.

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.

Maybe opportunity cost.

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

I'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.

I'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)

(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.

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.

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

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.

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-...

If they were overly-dependent on SEO... their Alexa rank sure seems to have fallen a lot since the middle of 2015.

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.

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.

s/Premium/Prime/

Many times companies can inflate revenues, or the revenue is very costly to acquire.

These are two examples, though I don't know enough about Simply Hired to say if they did either.

1) Companies with Ad Revenue quote the gross amount, rather than the net they keep. So let's say that someone spends a dollar on advertising. 60 cents may go to the website that hosted the ad, 10 cents to their software vendor, 20 cents to an exchange, and 10 cents to the buyer's website. Everyone counts this as a dollar of revenue, even though they're passing through most of the costs. This is most often seen in advertising or other reselling markets.

2) They spend $2000 in advertising to get a customer with a lifetime value of $1000. Sometimes this is a deliberate Ponzi scheme, other times it's done with honest intent. It can be very hard to predict lifetime customer value.

About your second point, the only reason companies might do is to show growth and get more funding. Otherwise it's plain stupid IMO. For enterprise customers the predicting lifetime value might be tough, but in consumer business,they should be able to predict at least the average lifetime.

It can be tougher in consumer businesses. A game may seem hot for a while, but then all the users move at once. Or early adopters use the software longer or slower than the average user who comes later.

This doesn't mean they shouldn't be measured, just that it's very tough to get it accurate, and a small change in user churn can have a huge impact on corporate valuation.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the name rings a bell from a scraper company I worked at some 10 years ago (I left that company in 2008).

Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest))

This scraper was easier programming then anything else out there (think visual domain specific programming language). 7 years after having left that company I was called into an interview at a rather big HR company, with them essentially asking me to meet and greet a group of 20 people, all of them working with an old old version of said software, that I had worked on releasing - as a team of two - many years prior. Quite the bizarre encounter telling them how to work with a product that was IE 5.5 compatible, and drawing on old legacy knowledge for said purpose.

> Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest))

If you don't mind, can you tell me the name of the software? I was very much into scraping business myself around 2008. One of things I failed to do was to scrape a site made in ASP.NET Webforms. I was looking for software that could emulate Javascript and I think can recall something of that sorts that I saw.

Software was Kapow RoboSuite, it's since been going through a few acquisitions and can now be found at http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction. The web site really doesnt tell a great story of the technical details, best thing is probably http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds...

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. :)

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.

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

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

I 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.

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.

    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...

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810217

Perceived 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.

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?"

It'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.

Could 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.

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