July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Searching for a job is a stressful process that involves web searches, exhaustive emailing, networking, and ends with anxiously awaiting a phone call. However a study issued today found that job seekers are increasingly turning to mobile devices for every part of the quest for employment, starting with search.

The study was conducted by Glassdoor, a career and jobs community site. It has information on more than 250,000 companies, 20 million registered users, and 13 million monthly unique visitors. Glassdoor launched an iPad app last week and led an accompanying effort to explore mobile job seeker behavior.

Glassdoor found that 68 percent of job seekers are using their mobile device to search for jobs once a week or more. 3 in 5 job seekers has searched for jobs on their mobile device in the past year, and 30 percent search for jobs more than once a day from their phones. As anyone who has been unemployed (or in transition) knows, the state of uncertainty lends itself to compulsive searching, hoping that your dream job has popped up in the last hour.

60 percent of people are likely to search for jobs on their mobile device, while 54 percent are likely to read company reviews, 52 percent will research salary information when they are on-the-go, and 46 percent want job alerts pushed to them. One in four job seekers are deterred from applying to a job if the company’s career site is not mobile optimized, and 30 percent think applying for jobs on mobile devices is difficult. Phones are good for some tasks, but answering questions about why you are the best suited for a position is best done at an actual keyboard.

As we continue to rely on a smartphones for everything from social media contact to managing health care, job searching is likely to head in this direction as well. 84 percent of respondents said they believe mobile devices will be the most common way people search for jobs within the next five years. Mobile technology lends itself to situations where you want immediate, context-driven results. Part of looking for a job is typing in search parameters and receiving results, but word-of-mouth, referrals, and networking drive recruiting and hiring, at least in the tech world. If you hear about an opportunity while out-and-about, your phone is the clearest method to learn more.

Mobile devices are also useful for staying on top of a company’s news and being prepared for an interview. 64 percent of candidates said they check a company’s social media channels in the hours before an interview. 43 percent of candidates use their smartphones before an interview to read the job description and 34 percent said they visit the company’s website. Once the interview starts however, 78 percent avoid using their phones.

Glassdoor surveyed 1,100 employees and job seekers online. The company has raised $42.2 million to date and is based in Sausalito, California.

Photo Credit:antrophe/Flickr

DeveloperAuction, a startup that focuses on…

No, let’s make this interesting.

Complete the sentence, multiple choice! DeveloperAuction is ___________:

A) A mobile app that lets you share photos with your friends. But this one’s totally different, I swear.
B) Airbnb for oil tankers.
C) A site that helps developers get jobs.
D) Subscription commerce for the $10 billion bear-hunting industry. It’s been 12 days since the last accidental postal-worker bear-trap maiming!
E) In stealth mode. Sad trombone sound effect.

If you guessed C, you might be literate! DeveloperAuction, as the name would imply, lets developers set up sexy websites for themselves and try to find new job opportunities. It gives them tags for skills, brief résumés, and even handy GitHub widgets. In that sense, it’s very much like Work for Pie.

But wait! There’s a twist: the “auction” part of DeveloperAuction, where companies get two weeks to bid on top candidates.

To date, the startup tells us via email, the platform has played host to around $225 million in job offers. And with today’s news, the company is seeing some inbound cash as well: $2.7 million in a first round of institutional funding led by NEA and Sierra Ventures with participation from Google Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Jeff Clavier’s
SoftTech VC.

“The most common tactic for recruiters is spamming LinkedIn, and it’s not unusual for a Silicon Valley engineer to receive 30-50 unsolicited and off-base LinkedIn messages a month from recruiters,” said co-founder/CEO Matt Mickiewicz in a statement on the news.

“It’s a waste of time and resources for all parties involved.”

So, auctions. In the current inflated developer job market, when there’s a lot more demand than supply, these kinds of tactics presumably work well and cater to market dynamics.

There are a couple other interesting twists: The site will only feature 300 auctions each month, so only the top talent will be sold to the highest bidder. Each dev gets his or her own agent, who represents and guides the dev through the process. And if a dev gets a job through DeveloperAuction, the company pays out a signing bonus.

DeveloperAuction is based in San Francisco and was founded by Mickiewicz (99designs founder), Douglas Feirstein (LiveOps founder), and Allan Grant, serial entrepreneur.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

The find-jobs-anywhere site has now reached 100 million unique monthly visitors, including half of all U.S. job search traffic, and delivers more hires, it says, than CareerBuilder, Monster, and career-networking darling LinkedIn combined.

Take that, Facebook and Twitter.

“There’s a lot of focus on social … you can’t read a story about job seeking without reading about it,” said Indeed VP of product Chris Hyams when I chatted with him this afternoon. “We don’t discount that, but you have to start with the simplest thing: You have to have more jobs.”

Source: Indeed

Last month on Indeed

Indeed has stayed laser-focused throughout its eight years, Hyams said, on three things: More jobs on the site, keeping the site as fast as possible, and focusing pretty much exclusively on providing the best possible job-seeking experience for job hunters.

That’s translated to about 16 million jobs being present on the site at any given time, three billion job searches just in the last month, and according to a recent study by SilkRoad of more than 150,000 hires, more people finding jobs through Indeed than any other career site or service. Not to mention the number one mobile app for Android, iPhone, and iPad for job seekers, and that one new account is created on Indeed every single second.

“We’ve been working incredibly hard to get jobs the minute they are posted in every country,” Hyams said. “Our key metric is people getting jobs.”

I see a ton on new startups who are focusing on hiring and recruiting. KarmaHire, Zao, Path.io, GetHired, Quixey, Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, Spark Hire, and InnovateCV are just a few of them. And each of them wants to reap the rich rewards of helping companies and people connect in careers.

But it seems like they’ve got a long, long way to go to beat the big kahuna of hiring in the U.S. and beyond.

The result, according to Hyams?

“If you’re an employer and you want to reach job seekers, Indeed.com is where to go.”

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc

Realistically, the company will need a lot of its own good karma to win in this super-competitive startup niche. But CEO James Clift is optimistic:

“We’ve been able to convert about three times better than the industry average,” Clift says. “And we’re just getting started.”

Source: John Koetsier

KarmaHire CEO James Clift

KarmaHire’s flipping the funnel, in a sense, on recruiting. While most job ads these days are about what companies want from people, Clift is switching that to what people want from companies. A huge shift the company has uncovered, he says, is that huge numbers of people are not looking or that starter job or the subsistence salary. Instead, they’re looking for a great working environment and hard problems to solve.

Seventy-five percent of job ad viewers, the company says, are already employed.

They don’t just want a job; they want an awesome job. So KarmaHire, which just graduated this week from Vancouver-based accelerator GrowLab, built a platform to make that happen.

“We transform job postings into job advertisements,” he said.

That means they look like elegant, designed — not like Craigslist or Monster.com listings:

Source: KarmaHire

KarmaHire’s job “ads”

The company has seen success and is helping companies find talent faster.

But it has a ton of competition in the recruiting space. Zao is gamifying recruiting. Path.to is following the eHarmony match-made-in-heaven model. GetHired is doing daily deals for jobs. Quixey wants you to solve puzzles to get recruited. And any number of new video-based interviewing companies like Wowzer, enRecruit, VisualCV, Spark Hire, and InnovateCV want to make video the center point of the hiring experience.

All of which means that recruiting is a vastly competitive marketplace.

Clift, however, thinks KarmaHire has what it takes, saying the company is already successful and has a lot of room to grow.

KarmaHire is based in Vancouver and is in the process of raising a $250,000 seed round, some of which is already committed. The service is in a private beta test right now and will launch into public beta next week.

From the technically savvy bubble of Silicon Valley, it is easy to forget there are people who don’t know how to use the Internet.

JobScout launched across the country today to teach people the essential Internet skills they need to find a job.

I couldn’t navigate my way out of a paper bag without Google Maps, and I tease my parents for preferring checks to Venmo. However, a study by the Pew Internet Project in 2012 found that a staggering one in five American adults do not use the Internet. These 60 million people are predominantly senior citizens, non-native English speakers, adults with less than a high school education, people from low-income backgrounds, and adults with disabilities.

Basic Internet skills are a necessary requirement for many of the jobs available today, and not having these skills makes the process of securing employment even more difficult than it already is.

“There were people going into libraries all around California trying to find work, asking for help, being sat in front of a computer with Monster.com on the screen and no clue how to use it,” said CEO Christina Gagnier at the launch event. “

JobScout seeks to address these oft-overlooked segments of the population through its easy-to-use educational platform that offers 39 interactive lessons. Topics are presented in simple language with a step-by-step methodology that focuses on practical skills. Subjects range from using Gmail to ‘Introduction to Internet Browsing’ to ‘Using the Internet to Prepare for an Interview.’ Once students successfully complete a course, they earn scout-like badges to track their progress. 

The goal of the curriculum is to give people the skills they need to get hired. To this end, JobScout provides not only education but also resources to help people with the job-search process. It has modules dedicated to using the Internet for job opportunities, as well as a job search dashboard, a ResumeBuilder, and a one-button submission process with pre-formatted cover letters. Users can manage all the components of their hunt on JobScout and track their progress.

Along with the national debut, JobScout also released its iOS app and introduced COMPASS. COMPASS is a data analytics system that organizations such as libraries, schools, and  workforce development centers can use to monitor the progress of their clients. The system collects metrics on the number of users, lessons taken, badges earned, number of jobs searched and applied to, etc.

JobScout is a “startup that was never meant to be a startup.” Its parents company TRAIL develops apps to help people manage their day-to-day life. The team was approached by the California State Library and Link Americas, a foundation that promotes digital literacy. These organizations saw a clear problem and, in true San Francisco form, wanted a startup to help them solve it.

The platform is currently available in 600 libraries in California, and the Los Angeles Office of Education has also expressed interest. Android and Spanish-language applications are also in the works.

This guest post was written by entrepreneur Elli Sharef.

Last week I wrote a short piece on VentureBeat about the pros and cons of working at a startup. While I got tons of questions and feedback in response to the piece (thanks, VentureBeat community!), the most common question I received was this: “How do I figure out whether or not a particular startup is worth joining?”

One candidate put it this way: “I know I have what it takes to work at a startup — the grit, perseverance  comfort with ambiguity– and I am fine taking a pay-cut, but how do I evaluate a startup before I join them, given how little public information is available?”

Here is my advice: If you are thinking about joining a startup, ask yourself, “Would I invest a million dollars into this venture as an investor?” Joining a startup is an investment (of your time, energy, opportunity cost) so think of it in the same terms. Here are the five main things investors (and you) should consider before you take the job.

Assess the founders

Who are the founders of the startup you’re joining? Most investors will tell you that when they choose early-stage startups,  it’s always a bet on the people. This may be unintuitive at first (doesn’t the idea behind a company matter more?) but as fellow entrepreneurs can confirm, it’s execution, not good ideas, that really makes a company.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham put it well in a recent post on Hacker News: ”Joining the young Microsoft, for example, was a bet on Bill Gates and microcomputers, both of which turned out to be very good bets,” he said.  Meet with the founders (and insist on doing so even if the startup is already a bit larger) and make sure you think these are people who can really build a big business and have the ambition and vision to do so. Use your gut.

Understand the size of the market and the vision for the future

If the market is small or isn’t growing, it’s virtually impossible for the startup to become huge. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad for a startup to focus initially on a small niche. There just needs to be a future expansion play. For instance, many e-commerce startups begin by focusing on one very specific product, but have broader plans in other product areas.

Ask about profitability and growth

Investors always want to invest in startups that have seen traction. For early stage startups, 10 percent month-to-month is good; 20 percent is stellar. Does the startup you’re joining have that kind of traction? If not, there may be some good reasons for it  – but I would think twice before joining them. It’s hard for numbers to lie: If a startup’s active users or revenue is growing at 20 percent month-to-month over a sustained period of time, there is probably something interesting going on.

Make sure to ask about run-rate

Make sure the company has a bit of run-rate. You may be recruited by a startup that only has a few months left before it runs out of money. If there’s a good plan in place for raising a round (and if growth has been good), this may not be an issue. But you should make sure to ask your manager about this. Too many candidates coming from corporate backgrounds forget that startups are often operating with less than six months of cash in the bank!

Ask yourself what you’re going to learn in this job

Finally, make sure you look at each job within the broader context of your career goals — where are you hoping to end up? Does this job help you get there in terms of skills and experience? One candidate explained, “I wanted to get out of Flash and into HTML5 so I went and found a bunch of HTML work.” What is your plan for the next few years? Figure out where you’re going and make sure the job you take helps you get there.

Getting a job at a startup is really tough if you’re not an engineer. So, when you get an offer from a startup it might be tempting to take it without thinking twice. But if you value your time and energy, make sure to assess each startup as if you were an investor. Would you invest a million dollars? If not, you shouldn’t join as an employee either.

Elli Sharef is co-founder of HireArt, a jobs marketplace that uses online challenge-based interviews to vet job applicants. She began HireArt to fix a broken hiring and interview process and get people hired based on skills, not connections. Since starting HireArt, Elli and her team have placed hundreds of candidates in sales, service, and marketing jobs at dozens of employers. Prior to HireArt, she worked as a Business Analyst at McKinsey and Director of Strategy at the University of Phoenix.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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Its best, most educated, and highest-paid staff are continually trolling on Twitter for a new job. They’re not actively looking for a better job, just keeping an ear to the ground in case one comes up.

That’s just one of the insights from social recruiting company Jobvite‘s latest poll.

“The mass layoffs that we saw in 2008 and 2009 frightened people so much that essentially they’re always looking for the next job,” Jobvite chief executive Dan Finnigan told me this morning. “The root of it is the presumption people have that they need to be the drivers of their own careers … that one company won’t do it for them.”

The survey looked at 2,100 adults’ behavior on Twitter, finding that college-educated professionals who are open to new opportunities but not actively seeking new jobs — passive career managers — are more than three times as likely to be using Twitter to advance their careers than even proactive high-school educated jobseekers who don’t have a job.

“We’re seeing more and more white-collar professionals doing this,” Finnigan said. “They’re currently employed, more likely to be higher income, and higher educated … and more likely to use Twitter to keep up on job opportunities.”

Those passive career managers are also, unsurprisingly, four times as likely to have found their job on Twitter or another social network, such as LinkedIn.

Passive career managers, Finnigan said, tend to create Twitter lists of companies they admire, plus lists of top companies in their industries and leading professionals in their area. Then, when an opportunity comes along, they see it immediately. Alternatively, over time, they build up a relationship with a hiring company or manager, which can lead to a job switch.

“We have a designer who got his job via Twitter — he followed our lead designer, and, over time, just asked if we were hiring,” Finnigan told me.

Forty-six percent of the American workforce now uses Twitter, Jobvite says, and LinkedIn is at 41 percent. That’s basically half the workforce. But more importantly, it’s the higher-skill, higher-pay half.

Which means companies have their jobs cut out for them to continue to engage existing staff. And recruiters, Finnigan says, need to change their game plans.

“This sought-after talent pool is using Twitter more than ever to stay on top of new opportunities. Recruiters failing to take advantage of this shift are missing out on this to the detriment of their clients.”

photo credit: Stéfan via photopin cc

In the wake of a tumultuous and divisive election cycle, Facebook has taken the wraps off a new app that’s part politics, part job site, and 100 percent letdown.

The Social Jobs app is the result of a yearlong effort from Facebook, the Department of Labor, and other government agencies to help get unemployed and underemployed Americans back to work.

The resulting application consolidates listings from sources like Jobvite and Monster, with new tools for recruiters to post jobs directly to Facebook. Currently, the app’s big, shiny counter lists 1.7 million jobs and counting.

A recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that more and more employers are using Facebook as part of the hiring process — whether that’s doing research to weed out immature or risky candidates or using the site as a recruitment channel and referral network.

“Our labor market is changing, and so should the tools we use to find jobs,” said Facebook VP of global public policy Marnie Levine when the partnership was first announced. “This is really just the beginning.”

The job-search portion of the app is fairly simple, but it’s not as well designed or as cohesive as one might like. You choose your location and profession, and Facebook returns a few tabs — yes, tabs — from different jobs sites rather than presenting you with a pretty, algorithmically optimized single page of results and application options. The entire thing is lackluster, considering a whole group of agencies and the most significant social network on the planet spent an entire year working on it.

Also, this could be first-day-of-school jitters, but the app is returning unexpectedly inappropriate results for some searches. We started out, like the navel-gazers we are, looking for reporting and editing jobs in the Bay Area. When that search yielded no results at all, we tried searching for software development jobs in San Francisco. When that search returned no jobs, we assumed that one of two things had happened: a) Hell had frozen over, or b) the app was busted.

We reloaded the page and found that one of the tabs was showing 499 jobs for Rubyists in the greater Bay Area — hooray! But our mirth was short-lived, as most of the results were actually listings for marketing personnel, receptionists, machinists, and salesfolk. Another tab showed 49 results, but more than half of them were significantly out of geographic bounds, including positions in Washington and Georgia.

Close enough for government work? We guess so. But these days, we expect more from Facebook. The now-publicly traded company can’t make big promises about delivering hope to jobless Americans then return a result so uncharacteristically subpar.

For now, job-hunters are probably best off sticking with their current toolsets, referral networks, and good ol’ LinkedIn. Facebook’s Social Jobs app might improve in time, but on Day One, we have to call it a misfire.

Top image courtesy of Luna Vandoorne, Shutterstock

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Today, LinkedIn is reinventing itself with a new profile design.

We got a small sneak peek at the new design a couple months ago, but today we’re finally getting the full story — including the man-behind-the-curtain mechanics of how it works.

The roll-out to end users will also start today.

Not only is the profile much better-looking than in past iterations; it’s also packed with new kinds of data and visualizations of that data. The company has also worked to make editing your profile a simpler process.

“There’s really only a handful of companies that can connect … billions of people,” said LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner at a press event at LinkedIn’s Silicon Valley headquarters this morning.

“We’ve added 50 million users in the last year alone.” And now that the service has reached critical mass, Weiner said, it’s time to unveil some all-new hotness for those 175 million users. He called today’s news one of the biggest changes to a core product the company has ever seen.

Deep Nishar is LinkedIn’s senior vice president for user experience and product design. This morning, he likened the project to the Grand Canyon’s Skywalk, calling it an “insanely brilliant but simple product that changes people’s lives … That is the underpinning of the new LinkedIn.”

Over the past year or so, LinkedIn has started to place a huge emphasis on modern web design and the technology behind it.

In August 2011, the redesign rollouts started with a suite of mobile apps that got a ground-up overhaul and were surprisingly beautiful, considering the rather old-school design language of their origin.

Earlier this year, the company launched a sexy new iPad app and revealed a wildly different and refreshing design for the the LinkedIn homepage. That design is now available to LinkedIn’s users around the globe. And just a couple of weeks ago, the network gave all the companies and organizations new Company pages, too.

But the changes aren’t just sleek and sexy designs. The professional network has also put a lot of effort into making the site a great place for content — finding it, consuming it, creating it, and promoting it. Last year, the company launched LinkedIn Today, a sort of social/professional digital daily newspaper.

Stay tuned as this post is updated through the rest of LinkedIn’s press conference today.

Top image courtesy of Viktor Gladkov, Shutterstock.

Bright is launching today with a tall promise: It wants to find you a job. Not just any job: the job. The right job for you, the perfect match for your abilities and interests.

Ideally, if you’re only looking at the jobs that are right for you, you’ll be able to find a better job much faster — meaning looking for a job might not end up being the full-time, back-breaking pain in the butt it is right now.

In addition to serving up the right job for you, Bright also says it can “remove all the barriers that have restricted you from getting interviews for the jobs you want.”

The company accomplishes this through computer wizardry developed by its  team of nuclear physicists (not kidding — there is at least one nuclear physicist on Bright’s team), wizardry they like to call “the Bright Score.” This score is an algorithm that will reportedly generate the straightest, shortest path between Point A, an open position, and Point B, the perfect candidate.

To get the score, Bright tires to “find and use the nuances in how job seekers look and are evaluated for jobs.” That process ends with a number that represents how well you are qualified for a particular job, and the number is different for each candidate and each position.

“The Bright Score provides the only holistic way of capturing and interpreting a potential employee beyond just a resume and a social network profile,” a Bright representative told us. “The number takes into account hundreds of nuances from where you went to college to how long you were in a position to where your friends have job connections and more.”

For employers, Bright offers unlimited free job postings, and it promises to help hiring managers and HR folks connect directly to candidates via popular social networks like Facebook. Currently, the site claims nearly 1.5 million active job postings.

Here’s a sneak peak at the UI:

Bright’s biggest competition as we see it lies in habit, convention, and routine. Sure, there are quite a few up-and-coming job-search and HR startups out there, but their biggest competition is always going to be the way things are currently being done. You have entrenched digital oldsters like Monster and LinkedIn, and you have time-tested methods even stronger and more entrenched: the old-fashioned personal recommendation from within your social graph, the paper cover letter and resume. If Bright takes off at all, it will have to break through the overwhelming barrier these conventions present.

To date, Bright has raised $6 million. It has been working on the product for roughly a year and a half. Its team includes data scientists and supporting members from diverse backgrounds, a lineup of baby-faced geniuses from MIT and Berkeley, as well as mid-career folks in business and big data. Bright’s co-founders are Steve Goodman (a serial entrepreneur with some decent Silicon Valley connections) and Eduardo Vivas (the investor/entrepreneur with the vision for the product). The startup is based in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Sean De Burca, Shutterstock

Finding a job is hard. You grabbed a sales job after college, but you’re terrified of phone calls and your eyes glaze over while looking at sales figures. It’s all because you’re truly an introvert, an abstract thinker, and better suited to be a writer. If only you’d known these traits and looked for a job based on your own quirky psychology, maybe then you wouldn’t have to cry every time you had to make a sales call.

Careerimp figured out that job hunting is hard, too, and launched ApplyApp.ly, a job search tool that matches you with job postings based on your Myers-Briggs personality type and your LinkedIn profile.

You probably remember the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from freshman psych in college. The assessment was designed to pinpoint your attitudes, functions, and lifestyle. Let’s say out of the sixteen possibilities, I test as ESTJ (Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judgment). I’d be well suited for an outgoing, consistent job in which I can make concrete, logical decisions. Officially, you must take the test from a certified practitioner such as a psychologist or career counselor, although there are online versions that can give you a pretty good estimate of your personality profile, too.

ApplyApp.ly hopes that by using a psychological metric to find job matches, people will weed out irrelevant jobs from their hunt.

When you land the company’s website, it asks for your location and your four letter Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

ApplyApp.ly also performs semantic analysis on your LinkedIn profile to help find jobs (on other internet job search sites) that match your experience. That’s a better approach than keyword searches, the company claims.

The company is betting on its semantic search to create a more rewarding job search. You can upload a resume and the service will search listings that match the skills you claim to have. Each job posting will have a percentage score next to it, from zero to 100, that shows how close of a match the job is for your aptitudes.

“The list of available jobs generated by job search engines is primitive,” said Careerimp co-founder Mona Abdel-Halim in a statement. “Job seekers can put in the position and location they are interested in, but it doesn’t really provide them with a list of the most relevant jobs.”

An investor panel after ApplyApp.ly’s presentation raised questions about the underlying technology. “How do they build their relevancy engine?” asked David Friedberg of The Climate Corp., noting that it has to be better than what LinkedIn is already doing in terms of matching job seekers with opportunities.

Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, liked its look: “They really nailed the design and made me want to try the thing,” he said.

Competitors include CareerBliss, which evaluates what you like and don’t like about your current job to help you find something better.

ApplyApp.ly is both helped and hindered by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Not everyone knows their score and it can be costly and time consuming to take the test. For people who already know their score, the service will likely be beneficial, but it may take others some convincing to take the test.

Careerimp has raised funding from Innovation Works and private angel investors. The company has developed several other career-based products. Founded in 2010, Careerimp has seven employees and is based in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Careerimp is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Updated at 5:03 p.m. PT with more info about which teams were let go.

VentureBeat has learned that job search startup Simply Hired has laid off approximately 20 percent of its staff, according a source close to the company.

After repeated queries, the company would neither confirm nor deny the percentage of staff that it had laid off. However, it did admit that it had “consolidated” and “expanded operations offshore,” which means the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup has let go of at least some U.S. staffers. We left the door open for more information from the company, but it would only give us the following statement:

“As part of its 2012 strategy, Simply Hired made some changes to its organization,” said Simply Hired CEO Gautam Godhwani via e-mail. “We consolidated Bay Area operations to our new headquarters in Sunnyvale and expanded operations offshore. These changes were implemented at the start of the year as part of our annual planning process. The company is profitable with continued growth in Q1.”

Additionally, a second tipster has informed us that President/COO Dion Lim, VP of Sales Brian Corey, the QA team, and most of the sales team were let go in the layoffs.

Simply Hired competes with other job search sites like Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, and Dice. In mid-2010, the company took a big step with Facebook integration that would let you look up jobs based on where your friends work. As of today, the company counts LinkedIn, Twitter, PCWorld, BusinessWeek, and CNNMoney.com as partner sites. The company wouldn’t confirm how many employees it has, but 92 people listed themselves as employees of SimplyHired in professional profiles on LinkedIn.

In a second case of irony, Simply Hired owns the website www.simplyfired.com. When you go to simplyfired.com, the site re-directs to simplyhired.com. With regard to the layoffs, that’s unfortunate.

Simply Hired has raised $22.3 million in funding to date. It last raised $4.6 million in fourth-round capital in August 2009 from IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital. The company also had prior investments from Fox Interactive Media, Garage Technology Ventures, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, Guy Kawasaki, James Hong, and others.

If you know any other details about the Simply Hired layoffs (or any other pressing news), please drop us a line at tips@venturebeat.com.

Unemployed worker photo: Lasse Kristensen/Shutterstock

While I’m proud of my family’s service to Uncle Sam, veterans do need better ways to transition from military to civilian life — and the military isn’t very good at offering those tools.

To help veterans get into civilian careers faster and more smoothly, today both Google and LinkedIn announced new job-search tools just for current and former military personnel. Google has unveiled a new job search engine for vets, and LinkedIn is earmarking job postings that might be better suited to veterans.

Currently, around 850,000 military veterans are unemployed — that’s around 12 percent of post-9/11 vets. After their service to the country, many vets feel they’re left high and dry when it comes to civilian employment.

Former Marine Scot Ellison II has a typical story to share. He told us via Twitter, “There were required classes from the Marine Corps in transitioning out. But once I was out, I was on my own and had no help. I was jobless for the first two months of being out before I got work. And the work wasn’t desirable; it was enough to pay bills and support my family. Technically still struggling after four years.”

Google and LinkedIn hope the new tools will alleviate both the pressures of a military-to-civilian transition, and to ease the current jobs crisis.

LinkedIn announces, “We’ve joined forces with the White House to tag job postings on LinkedIn that could be filled by veterans. These tagged job postings will be accessible to the White House’s newly launched Veteran’s Job Bank and across veterans-oriented federal websites to make it easier for veterans to source opportunities relevant to them.”

Later this week, the company will be launching a microsite for veterans to find tips and tools for getting new jobs. And this Friday, which is Veterans’ Day, LinkedIn will be hosting a Veterans Hackday at its Silicon Valley headquarters.

As for Google, the search giant is working with the National Resource Directory, a special listings service for veterans, to create a customized job search engine for veterans. This engine will “identify veteran-committed job openings” on job sites around the web.

Finally, the White House itself is getting involved with the launch of MyNextMove.org, a site where vets can find their dream jobs, explore new career options, or even find a job similar to the work they did in the military.

This site uses data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) system, which the White House says is “the most comprehensive source of information on the knowledge, skills, abilities, work tasks, tools, technology and other important requirements needed to perform work for over 900 occupations covering the entire U.S. economy.” So far, more than 40,000 businesses and 150,000 workers have contributed data to O*NET’s collection.

Image courtesy of trevorsnyder.

Resu.me uses machine learning to match candidates and jobs the way a  human recruiter might: By Googling a person to try to find out what they read, what they write about, what they seem to be passionate about — as well as who they interact with, what they say, their open source contributions, who’s in their network and so on.

The company said it will appeal to younger users by keeping its key focus on providing all the tools and incentives required to learn daily, build a portfolio and showcase better.

That will in turn help them connect with a meaningful network and ultimately land a job.

Resu.me uses semantic web technology to analyze and understand the relevance behind what users post online on their resumes, as well as from all other online activities such as code they share, blog posts they like, articles they read, what and where they comment and so on.

The site also learns from the feedback users provide in the form of “likes,” comments and ratings on other users, companies, job postings, or other social media.

The platform is directly linked to the web-based applicant tracking system of companies. As such, Karthik said users won’t have to mess around anymore with filling out redundant forms and waiting. It’s a “1-click application”, always fresh resume with a transparent scheme to track the application’s progress.

On the flip side, companies can also provide feedback and ratings on resumes and the matching algorithm adapts to it. It also offers an RSS feed reader, which tracks all that a user reads and shares online, and a tool to showcase user artifacts using Cooliris 3D wall.

The site then offers all the tools necessary to manage all these activities from one single place.

The two-year-old company currently has four employees and is entirely self-funded.

It aims to take on four separate categories of competitors: Professional networks like LinkedIn and Xing; job search engines such as Indeed and SimplyHired; job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder or Dice; and applicant tracking systems Taleo and Bernard Hodes.

But in such a crowded space, how will resu.me compete with such well-established groups and tempt the famously fickle Gen Z users into giving it a try?

Manimaran said primarily because it is a simple, one-stop platform for managing your resume in real-time and with a host of tools that make it more flexible and intuitive than its competitors.

“We came across practical difficulties hiring talent for our groups and also finding a job for ourselves,” Manimaran told me. “We wanted a tool that could help us manage our online professional profile in a much more elegant fashion that would help companies find us faster.”

Uvisor is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Today at the DEMO conference, Uvisor is launching its full-service career-advice website, offering services from free job search to automated job matchmaking.

While there are lots of job sites out there,  Uvisor hopes its automated services will make it more useful than other sites to people looking for jobs. Uvisor has more than 630,000 positions and 949 professions currently listed in its database. Features include:

• automated career matching based on your personality and skills, with a patent-pending algorithm
• résumé-building with support for multiple resumes and various formats, fonts and colors
• one-click résumé submission
• a relocation tool
• background data on employers

The company uses its own data along with LinkedIn to identify people at potentially attractive companies who are already in your network or ought to be in your network.

Uvisor figures there’s lots of demand because of the ongoing recession in the country. About 14.6 million people are unemployed in the U.S., and more than half of all U.S. workers are unsatisfied with their jobs, according to a 2010 study by the Conference Board. ComScore estimates that more than 65 million Americans visited career sites in June.

Rivals in the job-search category include Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Simplyhired.com, Indeed.com, Jobfox.com and Hound.com.  Uvisor believes it is distinguishing itself by focusing on full-service career advice and bringing automated technology to bear on that topic. For instance, a user can fill out a job application with a single click as Uvisor automatically transfers data from someone’s résumé to the form. That makes sending out applications more efficient.

The company was founded by entrepreneurs Bryan Jakovcic and Jamie Sawicki in October 2008, just as the big recession was getting under way. Upon graduating from college, they received sound advice that identifying a career, not just a job, was a difficult task. They encountered few sophisticated tools to assist in that process, and so they started their own site. Uvisor has eight employees and is privately funded. It makes money on a variety of things including job listings and corporate partnerships.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

It’s no secret that the best way to find a job is often through a friend.

The job search engine SimplyHired is finding a way to tap into that with Facebook integration launching today. It lets you look up jobs at companies based on where your friends work and encourages you to reach out to them to make a personal connection.

The San Francisco-based company, which now has 70 employees and attracts 10 million unique visitors a month, will let you see a directory of where your friends work by company or by geographic area, provided they decide to share that information on Facebook. You can also get a rundown of facts, like the most popular employers among your friends.

“We want to create a job search experience that mimics offline behavior,” said chief executive Gautam Godhwani. “And the most natural thing to do when looking for a job is to connect with people you know.”

SimplyHired has had three venture-backed rounds of funding, with the most recent one last fall from IDG Ventures and Foundation Capital. The company earns revenue primarily through advertising and is about breakeven on a cash-flow basis. It indexes 3.5 million jobs and displays them on widgets across 10,000 sites.