It's time for another Publisher Spotlight, where we interview a Simply Hired Publisher to learn his or her tips and tricks for customization, promotion, and new uses. In this spotlight, we interviewed Mike Clark, who runs Health Care Hiring, about how he uses the Simply Hired API to create customized job sites within the health care sector--both in and outside of the U.S.
1. Tell us a little about your site/company/product.
Health Care Hiring (www.healthcarehiring.com) was started in 2001, after the dot-com bust, when I realized that the health care sector is not subject to mass layoffs and that there is a continuing, growing need for nurses, nursing aides, medical technicians and technologists, advanced practitioners, informatics, and all job descriptions throughout the health and medical fields. My company, Coconut Island Software (www.coconutisland.com) had developed and marketed "passive candidate" search engines for recruiters --but after 2001, companies were no longer looking for employees. Rather, people were looking for jobs. Recruiters were going out of business. The site has grown to about 5 million pages with contact information for health providers in 140 specialties, searchable by specialty, state, city and name. The basic idea is that job seekers can contact hospitals, clinics, doctors, etc. in their local area. We also have a lot of users who are medical billers and transcriptionists, and who use Health Care Hiring in their daily jobs.
2. Why did you decide to sign up with Job-a-matic and use Simply Hired's API?
Well, having kids to feed and tuition to pay…turning websites into revenue is a great idea! After healthcarehiring.com gained momentum, we began with AdSense ads. We published CareerBuilder jobs for a while, however in early 2009 they discontinued their publisher program, so we did some in-depth searching and found Simply Hired. We were invited to participate in the publisher program. Using the API to generate fresh page content is also helpful, and we have made use of this feature on a series of about 70 local jobs sites linked from www.jobs-central.info.
3. Why did you pick Simply Hired over other options?
When we were searching for a new jobs affiliate program, we talked to some other companies, and we found the Simply Hired/Job-a-matic staff to be the most responsive, helpful and courteous. Also we felt the time was right for the pay-per-click model. This gives employers a cost-effective way to advertise job openings--really a very competitive business model when compared with the costs of job postings on monster et al. When you invest a lot of time in site development, it's nice to believe the affiliate program is going to be around for a while.
4. What have you found to be the biggest benefit of Simply Hired's API?
There are many. (Sorry, here comes the geek-speak...) I am a programmer, and have experience working with several API programs. Simply Hired is simply the best. It's a programmer's delight. It's well documented. It's configurable. The variables are named with short names, which makes programming easier. It accepts variables separated by dashes (-) and slashes [/] rather than by equals [=] and ampersands [&], which makes it easier to pass the variables by http using different scripts on different servers written in different programming languages. The query structure is "friendly" to apache URL rewrite. It's accurate. Specifying certain health and medical jobs can be tough, because certain keywords (i.e. health, medical) appear in many, many job descriptions. The Simply Hired API accepts a long string of exclusion terms [+NOT+] which is invaluable in keeping the results on-target. They don't make changes requiring sites to alter their scripts. It's blazing fast. There have been very few problems and they get fixed quickly. We pound it relentlessly from 300 websites and 600 RSS feeds. It holds up to the punishment.
5. Do you have any customization that using the API allows you to do? If so, please describe.
There are specific API calls for international jobs, which we use for healthcarehiring.co.uk and healthcarehiring.ca. We have also developed a script which calls the XML from the Simply Hired API, and converts it to an RSS feed. Not a big deal really, but this allows us to use services like Twitterfeed to post to social networking sites. We have a job search box on most every page, which uses one script to access the API, and these pages feature a list of current jobs, which uses another script to post jobs relevant to the page content.
6. How do you promote your job board?
For search engines, we rely on organic search. Most of our web pages include a list of job postings, and the pages get submitted to the major engines using sitemaps.
7. What kind of promotion do you give job listings posted to your board?
Our primary focus is posting jobs. We do have employer sign-ups, but it is a small fraction. For social networking sites, we are using Twitterfeed to post individual job descriptions to Twitter and Facebook. We can reach a lot of people--especially young people--and we are doubly qualifying them because when they click on a twitter link, they come to our site, and they have to click a second time to follow up on the job posting.
8. To what do you owe the success of your job board?
We try to post valuable content that people want and need in their lives, their jobs and their businesses. We hope that people will find us through organic searches because our sites are not focused on individual keywords or phrases. Rather, we now have over 300 sites with about 40 million pages. Most of them are directories of contact information. Our latest series of sites is linked from www.guide-central.info. Volume, a numbers game, shelf space--call it what you will. There are hundreds of millions of people searching the web every day, and a lot of them are looking for jobs.
9. If you could pass along a single piece of advice to a new Job-a-matic publisher, what would it be?
Keep on truckin'. Keep developing good content. Keep promoting your content. Keep improving your efficiency. Keep innovating. Keep looking for new ways to reach out and touch someone.
10. For fun, what do you do with the income generated from your Job-a-matic account?
Food, rent, gas, tuition--it goes into the general fund--and maybe a little bit filters into the general's pocket...
