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LinkedIn vs. Indeed: The Apply Button Smackdown!

Ian Siegel —  July 18, 2012 — 13 Comments

How seriously do we take site simplicity at ZipRecruiter?

So seriously, we have on multiple occasions REMOVED wholly built features because they weren’t receiving wide enough adoption by our customers. (Nationwide posting – we hardly knew you.)

Therefore while it may seem like a no-brainer to add LinkedIn and Indeed Apply buttons to the site, we took nothing for granted.

After a two-week A/B test last February, we reached statistical significance and concluded that adding the two apply buttons increased the overall volume of applications by 5%.

That was against a run rate of 200k+ applications, so a 5% lift was an additional 10k applications per month.

Continue Reading…

In Recruiting, ZipRecruiter Updates , , , ,
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Job Board Power Rankings

Ian Siegel —  June 25, 2012 — 2 Comments

One of the most frequently asked questions we get at ZipRecruiter is “Which Job Board is the best?!” This is a difficult question because, to give you an accurate response, we would first need to collect all of the following information — What job title, in which market, at what time of year, and how much are you willing to spend for results?

That said, one thing that does tell a simple story is how much raw applicant volume each job board sends. Today we share some internal ZipRecruiter data in our new feature –  Job Board Power Rankings!

So let’s get right to it. ZipRecruiter feeds 30 job boards. What were the top 7 applicant drivers last month?

Job Board Power Rankings for May

1. Indeed

Continue Reading…

In Recruiting, ZipRecruiter Updates , , , ,
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ZipRecruiter Is 2 Years Old

Ian Siegel —  March 14, 2012 — 2 Comments

ZipRecruiter Growing, Turns TwoWell that was fast.

ZipRecruiter turned two in March.

A year ago we were still working at Ward’s kitchen table. Now we’re in a Santa Monica office and I can’t see Joe (who sits directly across from me) because an over-sized monitor is blocking the view.

A year ago we sat on wooden chairs. Now my chair has certified lumbar support. This is a big deal. Lumbar support is one of my new benchmarks for startup success.

We now have 14 employees (I just counted). We used ZipRecruiter to hire most of them.

We still have no standing meetings, no vacation policy, and no phone tree. Fingers crossed that never changes.

We are still 100% bootstrapped.

Employers are posting tens of thousands of new jobs per month.

1.5 million job seekers come through ZipRecruiter to view those jobs.

We are grateful to every employer and job seeker who is using the site. We are serious about bringing you together.

Thank you for two great years.

In Behind the Scenes, Recruiting, ZipRecruiter Updates ,
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EVERY Part of Applying for a Job Matters

Ian Siegel —  October 20, 2011 — 1 Comment

A couple months ago we had an opening for an “Exceptional Customer Service Representative” at ZipRecruiter. It was again time to eat our own dog food, which we love to do!

With genuine care, we wrote a job description that in both tone and content we thought would immediately resonate with our ideal candidate. Throughout the ad, we emphasized how crucial writing skills were for the position:

  • You have to be an excellent writer who enjoys writing
  • Great writing is key
  • Ideal candidate will be a strong writer

To gauge writing ability we asked only one question in the online application process: “Tell us about the best customer service experience you’ve had where YOU were the customer.”

Assuming the candidate didn’t make a spelling or grammatical mistake in the first paragraph, we read their resume. So how many resumes did we end up looking at?

Nine. You read that correctly. Just 9 of 114 applicants.

(Note to employers — attaching a quiz to your application can be a HUGE time saver.)

If you think I’m making that up, here are a few responses I just pulled at random. Not one word was edited. Continue Reading…

In Recruiting, Resumes & Cover Letters, Tips & Tricks
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Non-scale victory…

Ian Siegel —  September 29, 2011 — Leave a comment

If you have ever spent time dieting or working out you know there are an endless number of quantitative measures you can use to measure progress. Weight, body fat %, body mass index, resting heart rate, base metabolic rate, cholesterol, how far can I run, how much can I lift, how many calories can I burn, etc…, etc…, etc…

The same thing is true for a startup.  We can (and do)  look at a LOT of quantitative metrics like revenue, cohorts, profit margins, growth rates, average order size, traffic, conversion funnels, etc… because the more data we have, the better decisions we can make.

But a funny thing about all those numbers is that there is nothing in them as satisfying as getting real world qualitative feedback  that what you’re doing is working.

In the gym world, this is called a “non-scale victory”. Someone compliments the way you look, you need to buy new clothes because the old ones don’t fit, someone flirts with you, etc…

For us at ZipRecruiter HQ, we just had a great non-scale victory. We came in today to discover we’d received an unsolicited compliment of the ZipRecruiter service from Recruiter.com, the largest recruiter network online. To have a company of their stature use our product and tell everyone they liked it made our day in a way that no individual data point ever could. Thank you Recruiter.com!

In Behind the Scenes, Recruiting
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