Profile – Simply Hired

Company: SimplyHired
Founded: 2003
Launched: March 16, 2005
Location: Mountain View, CA

What is it?

Yes, we have been infatuated with jobs sites these last couple of days. Trust me, there’s more to come. This space is moving and we fully intend to jump on the train. Or in front of it. Hope to have a profiel of YorZ up later today as well.

Simply Hired
is a vertical search engine for jobs and can be compared to Indeed, its primary competitor. Yesterday, Simply Hired announced that it raised $3 million in new captial from Rajeev Motwani, Ron Conway, Kanwal Rekhi and Garage Technology Ventures. The company had previously raised $1.2 million from its founders. Guy Kawasaki also joined their board of directors.

Much like Indeed, Simply Hired gathers job postings from a huge set of sites, including Monster, the Wall Street Journal, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, craigslist and others. Simply Hired then structures the data in the postings and allows its users to search for specific keywords, titles, companies, locations, etc.

Searches can be further refined, including by freshness of the posting and by lists like “fortune 500”. Once a user has the final search result set that they want, future job postings meeting the search criteria can be delivered to the user via RSS and/or email alerts.

One interesting feature is the ability to rate a posting, with 1-5 stars. Their idea is to generate enough user rating content to be able to recommend job postings to you, based on how you’ve rated other postings (and how other users have rated those postings). See our profile on Loomia – they are doing something similar in the podcasting space.

To round things out, Simply hired has promotional snippets for your website here, and a corporate blog here. (sans comments).

I actually can’t say if I can pick between Indeed and Simply Hired. Both changed the jobs game permanently (as witnessed by Hotjobs changing their model to incorporate other listings). Both are excellent.

Simply Fired:

Simply Fired is a sister site to Simply Hired that is centered around Mark Jen, the 22 year old who was fired from Google for being incredibly stupid. The idea with Simply Fired is that you write the story of how you were fired, and win prizes if it’s considered one of the best. I tried to find a good story to link to but they are all pretty obvious – sleeping with bosses daughter, ran over bosses foot, etc. Some of them may even be true.

I have deep respect for this as a nice viral marketing tool (sort of), but FuckedCompany is a much better read.

But back to Simply Hired, it is a beautiful site with meaningful results, and definitely a cool web 2.0 business.

Team:

Gautam Godhwani, Founder/CEO
Peter Weck, Founder/CTO
Anil Godhwani, Founder/VP People
Jerry Crowley, Chairman of the Board
Dion Lim, VP Business Development
Dave McClure, Director of Marketing
Julie Craft,Director of Channel Partnerships
Link

Additional Links:

Press, Masterof500Hats (podcast interview with CEO), RSS Blog, Greg Hughes, bubble, Charlene Li, Recruiting.com, WhiteHotNow, ITToolbox, Job Opportunity Search Engine, Silicon Beat, SeattlePI, SyndicatorBlog