News Corp continue their Internet-based investments by chucking jointly investing $13.5m into a jobs search engine company, Simply Hired Inc, with VC firm, Foundation Capita. Back in August, Simply Hired previously raised $3m in a Series B round.
Simply Hired has a different business model. Rather than solicit open job positions directly from potential employees, they gather job postings from a wide set of sites, including Monster, the Wall Street Journal, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs and craigslist. They currently make money from placing advertising next to the job search results.
Users can create searches for required jobs based on title, company name, location, or keywords. Once defined, jobs that pop into their system are altered to the users either via email or RSS.
Newspapers generally have been getting worried about their increasing losses from classified advertising, including job adverts.
Murdoch’s News Corp has been splashing the cash recently on a number of Internet business, the most high profile being MySpace (MySpace considered) for $580m.