Wed
Jan
21
There are many costs involved in the service we provide at SourceSimple — the cost of advertising inventory, the cost of resume access, and the cost of time to perform the work, to name a few. As our service expands and we start to look for ways to move from start-up mode to profitability, we have to make sure the costs of our service never exceeds the fees that we charge. As expected for a start-up, we lost money in both 2007 and 2008; having a profitable 2009 is critical to our long-term success. As you know, our long-term success is critical to our clients receiving a service that provides significant benefits at minimum cost.
From this point forward, we will perform weekly resume updates rather than daily resume updates. Of course, we will still honor all search criteria change requests, and we will still deliver the resumes that result from a criteria change within 24 business hours, so you can continue receiving resumes every day by constantly revising the search criteria to match your needs better. Once you are satisfied that the criteria reflect your requirements, resumes will be updated weekly until the campaign concludes.
Over the past year Craigslist has radically shifted its pricing structure. At the beginning of 2007, Craigslist only charged in 4 metro markets; they increased that number to 7 markets during 2007; during 2008 they significantly increased the number of areras where they charge, so that now Craigslist advertising charges a fee in every major city in the US.
At SourceSimple, we were previously able to include free Craigslist advertising in our campaigns but we are no longer able to do so. In the past we could offset the cost of advertising in “fee areas” by taking advantage of the plethora of “free areas” — as nearly all “free areas” have now been eliminated, the cost of Craigslist has become prohibitive.
Since many of our clients want us to continue offering Craigslist within our Ultimate Campaigns, we’ve reached a compromise that should have universal appeal — we will subsidize half of the Craigslist costs for any client who requests it. In other words, if you purchase an Ultimate Campaign in an area where Craigslist charges $25, you can include Craigslist in your Ultimate Campaign for an additional fee of $12.50 (we cover the other half of the Craigslist fee); in areas where they charge $75, we’ll subsidize $37.50 of the cost.
One of our goals for SourceSimple for 2009 is to maximize our use of technology to deliver a higher level of service while maintaining our famously low price point. We’ve tried numerous off-the-shelf applications to accomplish this objective but none have been satisfactory. Our chosen path is to be the low-cost provider, which means we use economies of scale to prosper; the existing applications in the industry are all designed for low volume, high price business models.
We’ve begun the process of creating a home-grown technology solution. The first step is currently in place — a filter that should minimize multiple downloads of the same resume. If you think about it, we pay for each resume we download but only charge our clients one low flat fee per campaign; one of our greatest sources of waste is downloading the same resume several times from several resumes, paying double or even triple for the same resume. Since we’ve already implemented this filter, you should see an immediate side effect : the bulk of the resumes you receive for a given camapaign will come from the first database we search, with less resumes from the second database, and probably very few from the third. We’ll periodically change the search order of the databases so that we spread our resume views equally among all three.
Within the next 12 months, you should see these technology improvements:
- A “real” account management capacity that tracks active campaigns, past campaigns, and available campaigns
- The ability to set up alerts to motify you of particular account activities or statuses
- A private candidate database that stores all of the resumes you received, with sorting by campaign, date, name, and more
- The ability to receive resumes both by email and in the database, or in the database alone
- Tracking of multiple resumes for the same candidate, with all resumes stored under a common tab
- The ability to download resumes from your private database, to add notes to candidate profiles, and to rank candidates based on qualifications
- Complete statistics for all campaigns, including cost-per-fill and other critical business data
We’ll also be actively soliciting feedback every step along the way to make sure that what we build for you matches your needs as much as possible. This is just the beginning, and we fully intend to continue earning your patronage!
Mon
Sep
15
Our resumes from SourceSimple create the baseline for recruiting campaigns. Though baseline campaigns can definitely fill open positions, there are many occasions where more work must be done. If you believe you have a service that can add value on top of the resumes we provide, we’d love to talk to you.
Using our low-cost resumes as a base, there are myriad opportunities for enterprising individuals and organizations to open up incredible revenue opportunities. Send me an email with your ideas, and we’ll figure out how to work together!
We are proud to call ourselves a “low cost provider” — it it critical to our company mission to supply the best possible service at the lowest possible price. We have been able to maintain the $30 entry pricepoint for the last two years.
Due to rising costs and growth, we are raising our base price to $40 for 7 days. This price is still the lowest in the industry. Quite frankly, we believe it is impossible to find another sourcing partner who provides more service, or even equal service, for a price this low.
As a courtesy to our existing clients, we are offering the ability to pre-pay for $30 campaigns until the end of this week. Pre-paid campaigns never expire, so you there is no risk in stockpiling if you believe you’ll use them. If you want 5 or more campaigns at the old pricepoint, please send me an email today so that we can put the campaigns into your account.
Starting today, new campaigns submitted through our website at SourceSimple.com will be billed at the new rates. The only way to obtain the old pricing is by contacting us directly and pre-paying for at least 5 campaigns of any type. After this week all none pre-paid campaigns will start at the $40 pricepoint.
