Simply Hired Blog

fun with regional searches & famous songs

Hope everyone is enjoying the long holiday weekend (for those in the US). I've been relaxing just a bit, in between waking up every few hours to feed the kid. Life as a rookie dad isn't so bad, but doing a startup and new baby at the same time can test your sleep deprivation limits. Weekends are definitely helpful to catchup. Zzzzz... sorry, what was i saying?

Oh yes, now I remember: you may have noticed we recently introduced a browse metros link at the bottom of each page in our website footer. The browse metros page is a yahoo-directory style list of city links, and you can click on any link to browse jobs for that city or metro area.

We also introduced home page taglines that refer to famous songs or sayings about cities & states, like Tony Bennett's classic "I left my Heart in San Francisco". We think it's a fun way to demonstrate regional job searches (btw, if you think of a good city or state one-liner, contact us & send it in -- maybe we'll use it :)

Once you've started a search for jobs within a metro area or state, you can drill down further on the jobs you're looking for by typing more info in the 'refine your search' area on the left side of the page. Just type in the occupation or company in that area you're interested in, or choose a nearby city within the region, or specify how far in miles around that area you're looking. In the near future, we'll also add more drop-down lists for looking up jobs by occupation (several folks have asked for this one; we're working on it).

Down the road a bit, as we expand outside the US, we'll also be looking for fun songs or phrases about international cities & other countries. In fact, a few Canucks have already contacted us about adding jobs for the Great White North (to which we respond: eh? take off, you hoser!). Seriously, we do hope to include some non-US locations later this year, but at the moment we're still working on improving our current search & crawl capabilities.

In the meantime, have fun and check out a room in the Hotel California...

 

Internship Program Doubles in Size

Alas. I have been remiss.

I was walking out of Star Wars, thinking about Darth Vader as a father figure ("Luke, ksshhh, clean your room."), when I realized that our very own Darth Vader became a father recently as well, and I had completely forgotten to blog about it. (Doh!)

To that end: happy one-month birthday to Dante McClure and a belated congratulations to Saya and Dave.

On an unrelated note, we now have 2 applicants for the Simply Hired Internship Program (SHIP), which we plan to launch once they can walk.*

* There need to be some standards.

Kindergarten

Everything you need to know about RSS, you learned in kindergarten.

Since we recently added RSS support to the site, I thought I'd spend a few few bits & bytes talking about why RSS matters.

Except the truth is RSS doesn't matter.

(OK now before you flame me, the translation: RSS is a great protocol that enables a lot of cool functionality, but we think 99.9% of humanity shouldn't have to worry about anything more than clicking a little orange button. If even that.)

So I was attending a talk yesterday on RSS-and-all-things-Web-2.0 by Brad Feld. Brad is a pretty smart guy, but one of the more striking things he said was "hey, there's nothing new here... RSS in 2005 is just like email in 1995".

Now since I knew Brad's VC firm has invested in RSS technology companies like Technorati, Feedburner, and Newsgator, I assumed he must be making a point -- or else he'd been smoking some of that Rocky Mountain High he'd brought with him from Colorado.

Obviously there's more to RSS than just an orange button, but the point is your average Joe needs to know what RSS is about as much as they need to know how GPS works in order to work the map & directions gadget in their minivan. Which is to say, they don't.

On the other hand, there are a lot of useful things you can do with RSS. And there are a lot of cool services that produce & consume RSS like Feedster, FeedDemon, Bloglines, and MyYahoo.

But the more ubiquitous RSS becomes, the more invisible it needs to be (just like GPS); because the more invisible it becomes, the more useful it will continue to be (once again, just like GPS).

So if you're confused by RSS, just remember this sage advice:

Don't Panic

...just click on that little orange button.

RSS! And there was much rejoicing...

... yaaay.

Last night, a crack coalition of commando coders covertly crafted a set of updates to the simplyhired.com site.

RSS. You can finally save your search as an RSS feed. Seriously. We only have one format right now: RSS 2.0. And we probably didn't get it right. So please send us feedback, and let us know what additional RSS-related features you would like to see, and any changes you would like made to the feed.

Mo' Filters. And they keep coming. The newest additions to our family of filters are Date and Salary. If you only want to see jobs which have salary data, check the "has salary info" box. You can also narrow your results by requesting only the jobs found, for example, in the last 2 weeks, by using the Date Posted filter.

Job-a-Friend. See a great job which might interest a friend? Send it their way. The "Job-a-Friend" button allows you to send a link to the job to a friend. Or a family member. Or a lazy roommate who hasn't paid his rent in 3 months and spends all day on the sofa watching reruns of Saved by the Bell while you wake your butt up at 6am every day and drag yourself to Vascalinas where you do the drywall up there at the new McDonalds. Not that you are bitter.

Keep those feature requests coming. We are listening, honest.

Bad RAM! No Donut!

Two of the servers running our shiny site have some not-so-shiny RAM. The website will be down from 14:00 - 14:15 this afternoon to replace the RAM.