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Its (finally?) great to see a startup which is actually taking itself seriously, have built a compelling product that can easily compete globally on an even playing field, and is (finally?!) looking beyond portals and Adsense and quick cash fixes.
Simplicant.com is a product of Confiz Solutions lets you create a professional job board + applicant management backend to your website, quickly and easily.
Even though this product team has just been making this for the past half a year or so, the product is already showing a lot more maturity and depth of knowledge about HR compared to Brightspyre and Rozee combined.
Some of the features I thought were very relevant was a communications system whereby you can coordinate with applicants and the history of discussions get archived right next to the applicant so that you can tell exactly why you hired someone down the road. Also great is a team todo system which links to applicants and resumes. Incredibly important to help SME HR teams pipeline their hiring activity. On top of this, they let you easily add a professional looking company job board to complement your site (this is similar to Rozee’s feature but I prefer the Simplicant UI). Take a look at the CDF Job Board on Simplicant as an example.
The clear value proposition of this to SMEs is the time and cost they would save to set this up themselves. Our original CDF job page took a few days of effort for the backend testing system and even now it has its kinks and is a chore to maintain. With simplicant I get something I would like to use, can get going in 5-mins, and they get to maintain it for me.
But still, rather than charging for the board and application itself, I would have been sold and wowed if they gave away the app for free and charged premium for job ad distributions and tests much like Rozee etc. If I they had such features, I’d choose simplicant easily over the existing players just because they are focused on making me look good in front of candidates and I’ve long argued that that is the way forward in job board companies.
Overall, I think this is a great product, executed on a beautiful interface - and even though its a young team I’m impressed by their professionalism and enthusiasm.
Good job guys and I think a lot of people from this blog as well will find your product useful.
| Written by Osama A. on 05/15/08 in PakStartup |
comments(4) |

While our local job-board vendors keep exclaiming how they are innovating by creating white-labeled copies of their existing products (both Brightspyre and Rozee btw), Bayt.com actually ends up doing something remarkable.
This is what being remarkable is about - taking some big risks that get people (like me) want to talk about the service. The talk creates hype which eventually can make events like these exciting and successful.
Come to think of it, no matter how ‘planned’ Islamabad seems to be, it really isn’t that easy to navigate around in. The only good thing about this city is that it has signboards everywhere, so you know where you are at least. In order to alleviate problems, some companies decided to take it upon themselves to setup a digital map of the city. Naqsha.net was one of the pioneers in this field with a map offering using Adobe SVG viewer. Their data was quite accurate, upto 90% accurate according to some people i know, yet it was their reliance on the Adobe software which made it very hard to use.
Haris and Zigron’s team made a very bold and risky move to create a "fun product"
I, myself, have been guilty of recommending this course of action to quite a few people. Lately however, it got me thinking. Why is it that custom development is considered to be a track to failure, while product development is ruling the roost? Aren’t there quite a few product companies which are closing up as well, infact, even more quickly than custom development companies? A product is a risk. If you cannot find a large enough market for it, it doesn’t even justify its costs (ROI). Sometimes, you start out building a product with all the right market knowledge and even interested buyers, but by the time the first beta of the product rolls out, the market seems to have changed and your prospective leads have dried up. So many things can go wrong in the product area as well. So why?
A brand new startup 
I was mentioning to someone on dinner just the other day that there is a market for job-boards focused on H1-B jobs, and here we are with someone else already active with this idea.


