Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry says that Google is stepping up its efforts to buy VC-backed SimplyHired. The job search engine most recently made news with the launch of its job-o-matic which creates widgets for bloggers to create their own job boards and they also recently did a deal to power MySpace jobs.
SimplyHired is led by Gautam Godhwani, who sold AtWeb, an Internet site optimization firm to AOL/Netscape in 1998. President Dion Lim co-founded of Epinions.com (now Shopping.com) ans was COO at Sina.com. Last April, News Corporation’s Fox Interactive Media and Foundation Capital invested $13.5M in Simply Hired. A year earlier the company raised $3M in angel funding from early Google investors Rajeev Motwani and Ron Conway as wells as Kanwal Rekhi, and Garage Technology Ventures.
Simply Hired almost seems like it was built to be acquired by Google. Its angels are GOOG angels, its based in Mountain View, it targets the long tail and landed a MySpace deal, and Google doesn’t have a job search tool.
Simply Hired is bam in the middle of fierce competition including the big sites like Monster and Hot Jobs and Craigslist as well as the new breed of VC-backed job search engines like Indeed.com and Jobster.