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May 4, 2007

Google In Talks To Acquire SimplyHired

Michael Arrington

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Rumors surfaced today that Google is in discussions to acquire job search engine Simply Hired. Trip Chowdry, a research analyst at Global Equity Research first spoke about it, and the story was then picked up by Alarm:Clock.

I spoke with Simply Hired president Dion Lim, who confirmed that there is “lots of interest in us” from a number of parties but would not comment directly on the rumored deal.

Simply Hired recently raised $13.5 million from NewsCorp on a rumored sub-$40 million post money valuation. The company has raised a total of $17.7 million. Lim says that NewsCorp cannot block a third party acquisition.

Simply Hired competes directly with Indeed, another job search engine funded partially by the New York Times.

Comscore suggests that Indeed is much larger than Simply Hired, with 2.3 million monthly uniques v. Simply Hired’s 500,000. However, traffic from Simply Hired’s two main distribution deals, with MySpace and LinkedIn, are not reflected in Comscore traffic numbers. Chart is below.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Zaid

    May 4th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Ah may be this will bring some light to Guys’ Garage:)

  2. Zaid

    May 4th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

    “Simply Hired has raised $17.7M in funding from News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media, Foundation Capital, Garage Technology Ventures and individual investors.”
    http://www.garage.com/news/other/pr_06_04_19.shtml

  3. Jason Alba

    May 4th, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    Another interesting announcement for the employment space, leaving many scratching their heads wondering what it means for them (like the owners of the 40,000+ job boards) and many more wondering when Google will acquire them :p

    Also, glad to get clarification on the traffic, I was wondering why their traffic seemed low even after the two huge relationships.

    Jason Alba
    CEO - JibberJobber.com
    Personal Relationship and Career Manager

  4. Allen Stern

    May 4th, 2007 at 5:20 pm

    While some are saying this is a poor deal, as I wrote on CN (click my name), I think this makes sense for Google to be able to get into some spots that SH already is into.

  5. David Mackey

    May 4th, 2007 at 5:48 pm

    Sounds like the rumor is a little more reliable than Microsoft’s acquiring Yahoo earlier. Might not be a bad idea for Google. They don’t have anything in the field right now.

  6. Bilal Hameed

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    VC Ratings think differently
    http://vcratings.thedealblogs......_searc.php

  7. PohEe.com

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:03 pm

    Why don’t google buy over Monster.com. Then, they can easily eat up the whole market.

  8. Alex Rudloff

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:16 pm

    The folks over at SH are good peeps. Hopefully this will play out well for them!

    As Jason pointed out, it will certainly shake up an increasingly competitive space. Eventually, the “big three” in the employment arena are going to have to respond to all the innovation thats taken place these last few years, especially if they have to try and stare down the google-beast.

    Should be interesting.

    Best,

    Alex Rudloff
    Emurse.com

  9. Joe Graham

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:24 pm

    I haven’t used any yet, however indeed.com looks so much more appealing and Google like.

  10. Don Wilson

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:26 pm

    indeed.com has one of the fastest loading websites I’ve ever seen.

  11. Allen Stern

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:34 pm

    I did an interview with the Indeed CEO a couple months ago… he very much impressed me with his knowledge of the industry and about where Indeed is going:
    http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ul-forster

    Though I like the Simply Hired team as well. I met them a couple of times and they seemed very smart and forward thinking.

  12. Silly Poop

    May 4th, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    what the hell is going on with all the merger/acquisition stuff? first google’s doubleclick acquisition. then yahoo’s whatever acquisition of that other ad firm. then the WSJ gets a buyout offer from news corp. then yahoo/microsoft are considering a merger. and today reuter’s stock surged on buyout rumors. and now “Google In Talks To Acquire SimplyHired” on TechCrunch.

  13. Jay

    May 4th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    Interesting. There’s a lot of talk about acquisitions and merger everywhere.

  14. Daniel Gardner

    May 4th, 2007 at 8:43 pm

    Fox will buy them before Google ever do!

    They have a 13.5m investment and it powers MySpace careers (look at the chart in Mike’s post to see how badly they are doing in their native traffic).

    I just made a post about this on my blog (click my link) titled “Google’s tactic on vertical search: Simply buy em”

  15. Andrew

    May 4th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    if indeed took valley money over NYC money it could have been them. but just a rumor.

  16. Yakov

    May 4th, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    Simply Hired should likely be of interest to a major publisher or media group and unlikely of interest to Google.

  17. William

    May 4th, 2007 at 9:54 pm

    Karmaone.com has recently been acquired by Spotajob.com, what is going on in this job portal market, something big?

  18. Charlie

    May 4th, 2007 at 10:12 pm

    @ Andrew… Or maybe SimplyHired can be bought cheaper b/c it has so much less traffic?

    I’m pretty sure that Google is well aware of the existance of both companies and hasn’t become so successful only by doing “insider” deals with people they know. That’s a ridiculous assertion.

    Actually, its more likely that NewsCorp, a SH investor, and major Google partner for MySpace, put the two together.

  19. Mike Abundo

    May 5th, 2007 at 1:41 am

    Between AdSense and Simply Hired, all your jobs will belong to Google.

  20. raj

    May 5th, 2007 at 3:01 am

    vertical search engines are dead market…i do not remember using single vertical search engine for any thing…why do anyone want to pay anything to them?

    these are rumors created by losing companies to get some attention…thats all…..cannot google twist algorithm and list all jobs at googjobs.com or something!!

  21. misconstrued

    May 5th, 2007 at 5:30 am

    Indeed sure looks a lot like Google:
    http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=f.....mp;l=90210

  22. ChiggerBite

    May 5th, 2007 at 7:21 am

    The reality is that the job space is different than, say, the travel space for vertical search.(Kayak, etc.) The point of the vertical search engine is to get all the job listings in one place, a phenomenally useful tool for job seekers. But as soon as you have to go to 2 or 3 sites, the vertical search rapidly becomes a lot less useful.

    With Hotjobs, CareerBuilder, and Monster providing 30% of the total jobs, if you lose one major provider, you are hurt, and if you lose two major providers, you might be done.

    This is what happened to ebay with AuctionWatch many years ago… a vertical search company for auction listings. If Google acquired SimplyHired, Yahoo! could (and should) simply block their search engine, and its efficacy for job seekers would be crippled.

    Alex Rudloff is right; Monster and CareerBuilder are going to be “googled” if they don’t shut down Indeed and SimplyHired before it is too late. If they don’t, employer traffic will start to flow to low cost providers of job search like JobThread, (employers can build their own job sites and submit jobs to Indeed and SH). Once this happens, the big three lose their ability to drive job seekers to their sites, and employers stop paying for those expensive postings to the (now) Middlemen.

    Ironically, this is more or less the same thing that Monster did to Newspaper classifieds in the first go around.

  23. Adam

    May 5th, 2007 at 11:29 am

    I’m not sure that this is really that great of a deal for any of the investors. Even if they were to sell for $50 million, this is barely a 2x return for the investors. A nice little payday, but nothing to write home about.

  24. Jobman

    May 5th, 2007 at 1:32 pm

    This sounds like a self started rumor to me. Analysts can help start conversations with comments like this. Why SH over Indeed? Makes no sense to me if google is trying to get their advertising on popular sites. Indeed is the obvious leader in the job search space.

  25. Bob V

    May 5th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    It seems to me that Indeed.com would be the obvious choice instead of SimplyHired. I have tried them both and Indeed is a much better site.

  26. Matt Keegan

    May 5th, 2007 at 3:31 pm

    Indeed is superior to Simply Hired for finding work. With Simply Hired, I can’t stand it when plugging in a job title ads promoting Associated Content are included in with the results.

  27. bdb

    May 5th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

    @Adam- Actually, they raised $4.2M in an A round, and their pre-money was $26.5 (if my arithmetic is correct. So, that’s a little more than 6x. Now, they have the additional funding to go and add more value with this $13.5M. We’ll have to hear the acquisition id official before we can guess the exit value (and ROI).

  28. anonymous

    May 6th, 2007 at 7:08 am

    Has anyone else noticed that half their management team has disappeared over the past year? They are running with a skeleton crew compared to last year — doesn’t seem to jive with the relatively large amount of funding. I know at least one exec left to join eQuest out of the east bay — none of this indicates they are or were seeing significant success but as usual its hard to know the real deal unless you are an insider or close to it.

  29. Bill

    May 6th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

    I always wonder if big job aggregating boards are really the future? What about small, niche sites that can cater for particular people looking for jobs in certain sectors like HotelsCareers.com which advertised just hotel jobs.

  30. dave

    May 7th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    post money valuation says it all—it’s a dog, as is indeed. they used jobs, the 3rd biggest reason folks go to the internet, to offer pay per click ads on the side.

  31. Dennis Gorelik

    May 7th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

    Could anybody explain this:
    If Indeed.com has ~4 times more visitors than SimplyHired.com, why my web site http://www.postjobfree.com got 23+ times more visitors from Indeed.com than from SimplyHired.com?

    (Both Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com use the same XML feed).

  32. www.vmarketics.com

    May 9th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

    Google’s focus is getting clear with this acquisition by having control over “3C portal strategy” - content, communication & collaboration. It also marks the dominance of new era of web 2.0 services. Future of web is all about gadgets and widgets. can we call this phenomenon as “web p2p” - web 2.0 plug to play adapters.

    OH Google !

    ~BALA

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