For those of us who pay attention to these things, the recent rise in SimplyHired’s traffic on Compete and Alexa was noteworthy. Since April, both services show a dramatic rise in traffic - see chart to right, click for larger view). And more importantly, they show SimplyHired overtaking competitor Indeed, even though they have historically trailed them in reach and traffic.

There’s a problem though: Comscore shows no such increase in traffic - Indeed is still far ahead of Simply Hired in terms of unique visitors. The Comscore data is shown at the bottom of this post.

Here’s what the source of the discrepancy might be: We have heard that Simply Hired may have started buying a very large number of “pop-under” advertisements from WhenU. Comscore says that they filter this “push” traffic out of their stats. I suspect Alexa and Compete do not.

WhenU is regarded by many to be nothing more than malware, and users who’ve had it infect their machine spend a lot of time trying to get it removed. There are a number of forum threads where people try to help others remove it.

So, the question is, is Simply Hired associating itself with WhenU? Why? Is the only purpose of the ads to drive Simply Hired higher in the rankings of some of the metrics services? I have an email into their PR group, and await an answer.

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.

The world has changed since I wrote about the need for a decentralized job board service last August. Just not quite in the way I had hoped.

Job Boards are the product du jour of tech blogs. We have one, and countless others have sprung up as well. The idea is that the best candidates read these blogs, and by definition are up to speed on cutting edge tech issues. By advertising there, you get the benefit of access to those candidates, without the hundreds of unqualified resumes that come flying in from a Craigslist or Monster.com listing.

When we created our job board there was no plug and play service available to use, so we built it ourselves. We spent $2,000 to hire a coder, obtained a paypal account, and hit the button. Other than a few bugs here and there, it’s been smooth sailing.

Now, however, there are at least two services that will give you a “job board in a box”, and another one coming soon. Job Thread powers a number of job boards, including this one at Read/Write Web. They take 50% of revenues generated from listings, and as the publisher you can set your own listing price.

This morning SimplyHired is launching a competing service to Job Thread, called Job-a-matic. Like Job Thread, publishers can set their own listing price, and SimplyHired will take 50% of that. Simply Hired is also giving publishers the option of inserting other listings into their job board as well, and will share 30% of any revenue generated from those listings. Many big bloggers seem to agree - Guy Kawasaki, Om Malik, Jeff Jarvis, O’Reilly and John Battelle, among others, are being announced as customers (Om is ditching his own home-grown job board).

Edgeio (a company I own stock in) also announced their own product yesterday, called “Marketplaces.” Edgeio will allow bloggers to create job-specific classified boards, or launch full-on Craigslist competitors with all kinds of listings. They are charging less than the others, taking just 20% of total fees generated.

I think Simply Hired and Edgeio have done this the right way, because they’re taking these listings on individual sites and aggregating them into their search engines, creating far more value to the advertisers. Job Thread doesn’t aggregate the listings.

But what I think would create the most value, and what I called for in my post last August, is something a little different. Tools to easily create a job board are great for bloggers who don’t want to spend a couple of thousand dollars to build it themselves. But it will only exacerbate the problem we already have - too many niche job boards all over the place. Instead, I’d like to see a single job board for tech bloggers, one that we can all sell into, and share the revenues pro-rata. There’s no reason why TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm, Guy Kawasaki and the others should all have their data in separate silos, aggregated only at the SimplyHired or Edgeio level along with other less interesting listings from all over the planet. None of these announced products do this. If Edgeio moved in that direction, as I am urging them to do, I’ll ditch the CrunchBoard back end and join with them. The same goes for SimplyHired and JobThread. Let us create mini networks within the larger job search engines. Advertisers, job seekers and bloggers will all gain.

NYC-based Indeed.com, a niche search engine, has announced a partnership to power Mamma Careers. I’ll be the first to admit, this specific instance isn’t big news, but they are on a partnering spree, alongside their primary competitor, SimplyHired. SimplyHired powers MySpace Jobs, as well as LinkedIn Jobs (to name a couple). Both Indeed and SimplyHired are securing as many partnerships as possible to power the job search functionality on various websites. Employers can submit URLs to job listings, but can’t directly post jobs on Indeed or SimplyHired — that is still left to the established job sites including Yahoo’s HotJobs (insert link here), Monster.com, and CareerBuilder (insert link here).

Newspapers have long been the place to go for jobs — then the job sites (and Craigslist) popped up to provide an online version of the same service electronically. Now specific vertical job search engines (including Google Base) have evolved to aggregate and index job postings from online listings.

Enter social networking. The next evolution of online job searching would seem to be within social networking websites where users could refer friends to a job. As of now, Facebook and Friendster don’t have job searches yet. Look for partnerships in the future.

Jobster is a start-up that is heavily funded and focusing on adding some social networking aspects to the job hunt process. Another stealth start-up looking to “revolutionize” the online job search is itzBig, which we are told is backed by an investment bank and is being run by CEO Hank Stringer (founder of Hire.com) and Chairman Jim Hammock (former CEO/Chairman of Hire.com).

Online job websites have been around for 10 years now — they haven’t made much change since originally launching to improve the process of candidates looking for jobs, and recruiters looking for candidates. Recruiters have to paw through tons of resumes (that lack format consistency), and candidates have to search through multi-level marketing scams and other spam.

In all honesty, finding a job online sucks. Indeed and SimplyHired have taken it to the next level by aggregating all jobs into one search, but I want to see a company come out and eHarmony-ize the job market. Make it so candidates go through a 15- to 30-minute application process that might include various tests related to their claimed skillsets. Allow recruiters to specify what skillsets are required and make them somehow rank the importance of the required skillsets.

I’d also like to see some social networking aspects along the lines of LinkedIn — allow people to refer their friends to jobs. Yahoo! could integrate HotJobs with their 360 service. Monster.com could integrate with the Facebook API to add some social networking. IAC has put a hault on acquisitions, but a jobs website seems like a good addition to their extensive consumer portfolio — their own Ask.com search engine doesn’t offer a vertical job search. Possibly an Indeed or SimplyHired acquisition?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

Simply Hired, which is partially funded by Fox Interactive, is a great job search engine that continues to do well against arch-rival Indeed.com, which is backed by the New York Times. On Monday Simply Hired will announced another specialty search engine, this time for 50+ year olds. This adds already existing search engines for dog, mother, environmental and sexual orientation friendly companies.

The new senior-friendly job engine is live and can be accessed here. Simply Hired says that there are 77 millon baby boomer Americans who will begin to turn 60 this year, and that a crisis is on the horizon as these people drop out of the job market. Simply Hired wants to make it as easy as possible for these more mature citizens to find a job, should they choose to continue to work.

I like all of these specialty search engines, but I note that you can only search one engine at a time. So if you are a Senior Gay Mother who’s into the environment and has a dog, you’ll have to run multiple searches across five different search engines. Simply Hired says cross-searching on these engines is coming soon. In the meantime, Simply Hired has 5 million or so current job listings just waiting to be filled.

Our previous postings on Simply Hired are here, and Indeed are here.

In honor of National Gay and Lesbian Month, the online job search service SimplyHired has launched a GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) friendly job search feature. The new filter searches within companies given a perfect score for GLBT friendly policies by The Human Rights Campaign.

SimplyHired points out that there is no US federal policy prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation and workers in 34 states can be fired at any time based on these factors. That’s not right and it’s good to see a startup moving in to help with the situation.

SimplyHired is based in Mountain View, California and also offers filters for mom friendly jobs, dog friendly and other types of niche job requirements.

The investment that Simply Hired took from Fox Interactive seems to be paying dividends already. Tonight at 9 pm PST MySpace, a subsidiary of Fox Interactive, will unveil MySpace Careers, a new job site on MySpace powered by Simply Hired. This is interesting news mostly because of the massive traffic that the MySpace home page drives - and the new site has a link on that Myspace home page. No word on the deal terms, although I assume there is a revenue split based on the numerous advertisements MySpace is including on the new site.

Deals like this show the positive impact a corporate investor can have on a startup. Note that competitor Indeed took an investment from the New York Times last year, and they partially power the NYT online jobs search engine.

Simply Hired (TechCrunch profile) has raised $13.5 million from New Corp’s Fox Interactive group and Foundation Capital. Both investors will take board seats in the company.

This is big news for Simply Hired. The Fox investment almost certainly signals that Fox’s other properties, including MySpace, could have a very close relationship with Simply Hired in the near future. And - Simply Hired’s competitor Indeed has taken money from the New York Times. These startups now both have some very heavy hitters supporting them and it will be interesting to see how things shake out.

Another angle on this deal is what didn’t happen - this was not an outright acquisition by Fox, which has been on an acquisition tear lately. My guess is that acquisition discussions have been ongoing for some time, but the valuation on Simply Hired may have been too high for an outright purchase.

All of this is speculation of course. But the jobs space just got more interesting.

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