SimplyHired Job Search Engine Receives Fox Interactive Funding
Om Malik reports that Fox Interactive Media and Foundation Capital have ventured into the jobs search engine market with $13.5 million in funding of SimplyHired.com.
Back in February SEJ contributor and Local Social Search Guru Greg Sterling looked into SimplyHired, which he said is Simply Fascinating:
SimplyHired is a “metasearch” engine for jobs (job search is inherently local), but on top of search results the company is building lots and lots of added value. In other words, aggregating the listings from multiple providers (including the big three) is just the beginning.
Look at this result for “marketing” + “new york.” Beyond the filtering of results by selected criteria (e.g., location, education level, company size, etc.) one can save jobs, rate jobs, map jobs, virally email jobs, do salary research and, perhaps most significantly, network via linked-in (find contacts who work or have worked at the company).
All these additional job-specific services illustrate the value that verticals can bring to the user experience that is hard for general search engines to duplicate for many reasons.
Greg also added in a sit down with Reuters that SimplyHired is a logical next step for the users of Fox Interactive’s flagship MySpace:
“The demographic on MySpace is junior high school, high school and college kids … Some of these folks will be looking for jobs,” said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, an Internet consumer behavior consultant. “Why not be able to serve up listings from there?”
