Job-a-matic

Setting up Contextual Widgets

Over the past few months, we’ve had a number of announcements regarding job search widgets, including customizable widgets and international widgets. You may be wondering what the big deal is. In fact, job widgets can be a great way to boost your revenue, as well as provide very targeted and relevant job content to your site visitors.

To set up contextual widgets, first sign into your Job-a-matic® account (if you do not sign in before visiting the Widget Gallery, you will not get paid for sponsored jobs clicks). Navigate to the Promote tab and the Widget Gallery will appear. There are two types of widgets to choose from: the new customizable widget and pre-skinned widgets. Choose which widget you would like to display on your site. You can adjust the job content of either to match the pages of your site.

Choose the number of jobs that you wish to appear in the widget (max 20) and select whether you would like jobs posted to your Job-a-matic board above backfill jobs (recommended), or if you only want to display jobs from your board.

For customizable widgets: Enter the header for your widget (Ex: Product Marketing Jobs)

The Keywords and Location are where you can adjust the job listings that appear so that they match the content of your page.
 
Keyword Options:

1. Backfill: This means that the Keywords / Location will match your backfill settings. If you click the edit button and change your backfill settings, it will also change the backfill jobs of your Job-a-matic board.
2. Custom search: Here you can set this particular widget to search for particular jobs, differing from your board’s backfill. For example, if the widget will be alongside an article about healthcare, you can set your custom keywords to search for nurse jobs, physician jobs, physical therapist jobs, etc.

Location Options:

1. Backfill: This will set the location of the jobs displayed in the widget to your backfill location. Clicking the Edit button and changing the backfill will also change the backfill of your job board.
2. Based on user IP: Great for widgets that are placed along content that does not mention a specific location. This option matches the job content to the location of the user viewing the page, using information from their IP address.
3. Custom location: You can set the widget to show jobs from a specific location, and can be set to match the content of the page you place it on (Ex: San Francisco jobs). This will not change the backfill from your Job-a-matic board.

 Finally you can adjust the width, inclusion of an “All Jobs” link, “Post a Job” link or search box and (in the case of customizable widgets) the colors and appearance of the widget.

To place the widget on your site, copy and paste the customized HTML code provided below into your page.

Not sure how your content relates to job search? Just look for keywords within the content of the page. Possible content for widgets include:

• Company names
• Locations
• Skills or experience
• Job titles
• Industries (healthcare, finance)

Relevant job content displayed throughout your site is seen as valuable information rather than spam, making your users more likely to click on links to those jobs. Not only can contextual job widgets increase the user experience on your site, but they also promote your job board and increase your revenue.

Job-a-matic Turns Three!

Yesterday marked the third birthday of Simply Hired’s Job-a-matic, now the largest hosted online job board service. In the last year, Job-a-matic achieved a number of milestones:

- Pagination! Long gone are the days only one page of results. Now your users can view pages of jobs, to see every job that matches their search.

- New Job Widgets - Add jobs to your site with flair! Our new contextual job widgets have search functionality and can match the look and feel of your site.

- Partner Badges! Show your connection to Simply Hired and partner network by displaying our Partner Badge on your site.

- Job Search XML API - Blend our job content into your site with our XML API -- now available under the “Advanced” tab of your Job-a-matic account. Here you can also find international job content from all 17 countries in which Simply Hired has a presence. For technically inclined users only!

- International Widgets & Job Search Box - Add widgets or a search box to your site to add job content from our English-speaking countries: US, UK, India and Australia.

More to come! Stay tuned.

Happy Birthday, Job-a-matic!

Best Practices: SEO for your Job-a-matic Board

With just a few small tweaks to your Job-a-matic board, you can rank higher in searches performed on popular search engines. While there is no secret for making your site rank first, there are a number of modifications you can make to your site, as well as Job-a-matic job board to place higher in the searches that you want to show up in.

The first step is to know what you want to rank for and try to optimize your site for those keywords. Do you want your site to show up on top if someone searches for "accounting jobs", "jobs in Missoula", or "computer engineering jobs in Mountain View, CA"? When linking to your job board from your site, you should set the anchor text to those keywords. It is also helpful to include a link to your job board with those keywords in the footer of your website.

Set the title of your job board to something unique and descriptive. This can be done in your account in Configuration > Name & Pricing. This should be a short, accurate description of the page, and if your Job-a-matic board is part of a larger site, create a title for your job site which is different than the other pages of your site.

Content, content, content! This is one of the most important aspects of good SEO. When users see good content, they like to direct other users to see it. Further, the more inbound links to your site, the more search engines are likely to recognize it as quality content and boost your ranking. Keep your audience in mind -- if they can easily read the content on your site and if you are using the same language in your content as your readers do -- your site is likely to be more easily read by search engines as well.

In addition, make sure to include the keywords that you want to rank for into the text of your job board. Setting those search terms in your account under Configuration > Categories should also help, as well as setting the Backfill for your site.

There are many resources for SEO out there, and we recommend you to check out the following resources:

Google Webmaster essentials
Bing's Guidelines for successful indexing
Yahoo's Search Indexing and Ranking Help

Spotlight: U.S. News Best Careers 2010

Want more than a Job-a-matic board on your site to offer quality job content to your readers? Our customizable widgets not only get job info onto any page of your site, but they can be tailored to match the look and feel of the rest of your site. A great example of the customizable widgets being used by one of our larger partners is U.S. News.

Recently, U.S. News, a platform of the U.S. News Media Group, launched their annual list of the 50 Best Careers for 2010 online at www.usnews.com/careers with Simply Hired’s nifty contextual job search widgets on each career’s profile pages. Using the source code for the customizable Job-a-matic widgets and making some minor tweaks, U.S. News implemented job widgets that are incorporated seamlessly into the site, both in look and content.

To implement widgets like U.S. News, sign into your Job-a-matic account, navigate to the Promote tab, and click the link to Customizable widgets. There you can customize the content and color of the widgets, and pull the HTML code to insert the widget into your site.

How to Write a Quality Job Description

We’ve received word that job posters have asked some Job-a-matic publishers about how to put together a quality job listing. To aid you in a response, we’ve put together some info about well-written job descriptions.

In general, a good job description consists for four parts:

• Responsibilities/Duties
• Required Skills
• Optional Skills
• A brief blurb about the employers

Job seekers need to have enough information about the job to decide if it is an opportunity they are willing to pursue and assess if they have the needed background. It’s important to find a balance between excessively long job descriptions and those that do not provide enough information. Each section should be to the point while providing job seekers with enough information in order to make an informed decision when considering whether to apply to the job.

Within the description, don’t forget to include key terms and that describe the type of requirements needed for a person to perform well in a given position as well as words a someone might search for when looking for a job. It will help your jobs appear in the results when job seekers search for those keywords on SimplyHired.com and throughout the Simply Hired network. (Example: including Java or C++  proficiency in Software Engineer jobs)

And finally, a quick note on formatting: if your job description is a solid block of text, it is difficult for job seekers to see when they are—as well as are not—qualified for your position. Make it easy on them by dividing job descriptions into easy to read sections. Feel free to use bullet points to list off qualifications, so the job descriptions can easily become a checklist of requirements.

Current International Publisher Offering

Hello Job-a-matic publishers! As we mentioned recently and wrote a press release about, Simply Hired is now live in 17 countries, having launched localized job search sites for 16 countries outside of the U.S. since September of ’08.

What does this mean for you? Why, you now have the capability to add the job content from all of these international countries onto your site with our XML API. Our current platter of international job search sites include the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, India, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Brazil, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Mexico, Japan and China.

To access the XML API, log into your Job-a-matic account and click over to the Advanced tab. There you will find the documentation to add this job content in your site. Note: We currently do not offer technical help in implementing the XML API.

We also recently launched an international widget and search box that you can add to your site. You can read more information in our post, Simply Hired Announces New Tools for International Publishers. At this point, there is no monetization for clicks on non-U.S jobs.

Have questions or comments? Post them in the comments area below!

Simply Hired Announces New Tools for International Publishers

Last Friday, Simply Hired released an announcement about our rapid international growth, as well as new publisher tools that allow Web developers to include relevant job content and job search capabilities on their sites. Since October 2008, Simply Hired has launched localized job search sites in 17 international markets and today serves over 2.2 million job seekers outside the US on five continents and in nine languages.

The release also announced that job widgets and job search boxes are now also available for all English-language localized sites, which include the U.S., the U.K., Canada, India and Australia. The free job widget and job search box enables Web publishers to offer their visitors highly relevant job content and search capabilities on their websites using Simply Hired job content data. The job widgets may be individually customized, allowing you to display jobs that are relevant to your particular articles or posts.

To add job widget or job search box to your site, click the publisher link from any English-language site. For example, from the Simply Hired U.K. site:

Once on the U.K. Publisher page, you will notice in the left-hand side navigation, links to the Job Search Box and Job Search Widget.

To implement the job search box or job widget, just customize the search terms and copy and paste the html provided into your page or article. Note that there is no monetization for either of these tools at this time.

Stay tuned for updates! A multi-language version of the tool is expected by the end of the year.

Advertising 101: Promoting Job Postings

A best practice as a publisher is to advertise the new postings added to your site’s Job-a-matic board. Why, you ask? The benefiting parties are threefold: Advertisers will rejoice for the additional advertising their jobs receive and for the increased number of applicants that result from it, visitors to your site will appreciate the new, fresh content your site offers them and continue coming back for more, and you will enjoy the increased traffic to your site and more profit.

Not a marketing or advertising major? Don’t fret, it’s easy to advertise jobs on your site and no formal education is needed. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Create a blog post announcing each new job listing, or a weekly announcement of the new listings added.
• Add job widgets throughout your site containing not only new, but relevant job listings to supplement your content.
• Tweet new job listings on your Twitter account* (this can be automated).
• Have a monthly newsletter? Include a list of the new job listings*.

Opportunities abound!

* Note: You may only Tweet and email organic jobs. Organic jobs are those listed in the More Job Postings from the Web section of your board. This does not include Sponsored jobs (under the Featured Jobs from the Web section).

Holiday Promotions 2009: Discount Codes and Packages!

It’s that time of the year again. The weather becomes chilly, holiday music starts playing on the radio, and you can hear the faint “ca-ching” sound from cash registers around the globe…

This holiday season, don’t let your job board get lost in the crowd. Instead, why don’t you promote your Job-a-matic job board with a percent discount or job posting package deal to make it stand out? They are simple to set up and just might be the incentive some people might need to post their jobs on your site.

Discount Codes
Discount codes are the perfect way to promote your job board to a large audience, such as on your website or in a newsletter. They work much like discounts in traditional advertisements you may be seeing now online: you set the code to grant the user a percentage or dollar discount off your regular job listing price. You determine the discount!

You also have the capabilities to limit the code to be used only on a certain number of jobs (“First 10 jobs posted get 50% off!”) or for a certain length of time (Now through the end of December take $10 off!”).

Job Packages
Job packages are geared for those customers who are interested in posting a large quantity of jobs. Your customers pay for the bundle up-front with the first posting, and subsequent job postings will not be charged as long as they enter their package code.

With job packages, you can set a specific amount of jobs in the package (“Post 3 jobs for $100”) or set the package code to allow an unlimited number of job postings for a set price (“$300 for unlimited postings this month only!”).

Both discount code and job packages can be found and set up in your Job-a-matic account under the Promote tab.

Happy Holidays!

Developer API Now Available!

Free at last! We are pleased to announce free and open access to our Job Search XML API in the US and abroad. This gives you the capability to render job search results in real-time on your website. The API requires advanced web development skills to implement, but it's an excellent way to build more custom job search sites or add backfill jobs to other job board platforms.

Is the XML API right for me?

Our XML API requires more technical skills than our Job-a-matic® board. To determine if this is an appropriate option for you, ask yourself the following questions:

1.   Have you tried customizing your Job-a-matic using the header and footer fields? Do you need a more customized solution? If yes, the XML API may be appropriate for you.

2.   Do you have the technical background or a technical team to parse and render XML? If yes, you are a good candidate to use the XML API.

How do I implement it?

For access to our XML API, please log in to your Job-a-matic account and visit the 'Advanced' tab where you will find the technical documentation for your engineering team.

Please note that we do not provide technical support for the XML API at this time. For technical assistance, we recommend finding freelance developers at Elance or oDesk.

Job-a-matic goes International!

We have also enabled the capability to use the XML API for job content outside of the US.

• To see a listing of the countries where you can use the XML API, select the drop down menu on the right hand side of the XML API page.
• Although we have international results, please note that we only provide job content and do not offer posting or monetization opportunities on non-US content.

We are excited by what new opportunities the XML API presents and the success it will bring to your website!