SimplyHired Gains Fox Investment

Jobs "metasearch" engine SimplyHired has received a substantial round of funding ($13.5 million) from Fox Interactive Media and Foundation Capital. I had a two minute conversation about it with SH's Phil Carpenter today. Fox's parent, News Corp. is in the newspaper business, mostly abroad, and could potentially use the site and its vertical search/listings platform internationally on its newspaper sites. But this seems to be mostly about Fox's US properties and integration of SH's listings and functionality into those — including potentially MySpace.

CareerBuilder, Monster and Yahoo!'s HotJobs are the 1, 2 and 3 Jobs sites in that order. But SimplyHired is doing some interesting things that differentiate it from the category traffic leaders. Rather than just crawl and aggregate listings it's creating value-added services on top of that data. Most interesting among those efforts is SimplyHired's parternship with business networking site LinkedIn.

For every job listing that comes up there's a LinkedIn button. Click the button and you're immediately taken — assuming you have a LinkedIn account (which it seems almost everyone I speak to does at this point) — to a page that shows you any connections you may have at the hiring firm. This allows candidates to learn more about the company and/or find an internal champion for their efforts. There's nothing comparable to this at other jobs sites that I'm aware of.

Om Malik has more on the investment. Here's my earlier post on SimplyHired.
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TechCrunch also has some more info (and speculation) about the investment and reminds us that SimplyHired competitor Indeed has NY Times backing.

Related: FaceBook gets another $25 million. SiliconBeat has the details, and so does the WSJ (sub. req'd). Obvious comment #1: people are now taking social networking really seriously. Obvious comment #2: there's lots and lots of money out there.

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