Simply Hired®, a technology company that operates one of the world’s largest job search engines, today announced the appointment of James Beriker as President and CEO and Member of its Board of Directors. Beriker, who recently led targeting and performance businesses at Yahoo!, brings 20 years of proven success in scaling technology companies at every stage of growth. He previously served as President and CEO of Dapper, Efficient Frontier and Search123, where he and his teams drove the development of technologies that enabled online marketers to more effectively and efficiently reach consumers by leveraging performance-based models. As CEO of Simply Hired, Beriker will accelerate innovation of the technology platform, expand the business to international markets, scale operations and drive growth and monetization.
Beriker joins Simply Hired as the company posts record growth for its job search engine that provides job seekers with comprehensive, relevant job listings and employers with an efficient, performance-based solution for sourcing quality talent. Over the past year, Simply Hired has increased its job index to over eight million listings, making it the largest index of job listings in the world. Simply Hired also doubled its reach to more than 30 million monthly unique visitors, reaching job seekers on the web, social networks, mobile devices, email and through more than 40,000 partner sites.
"Recruiting is undergoing tremendous transformation as more efficient online solutions replace traditional channels for reaching candidates,” said Beriker. “Simply Hired has developed the most effective and scalable search platform for indexing jobs from company sites and other major sources to develop the most comprehensive, most current database of jobs. To help job seekers find their ‘needle in the haystack’ job opportunity, Simply Hired has developed algorithms for surfacing the right job opportunities to the right candidates at the right time, creating an efficient source of quality candidates for employers. Our goal is to continue to build on this technology advantage and transform the recruiting industry by bringing learnings from other performance-based marketplaces. I am very excited to be joining the Simply Hired team to build on its success.”
Beriker brings extensive start-up, growth stage and public company experience to his role as President and CEO. Beriker was co-founder, President and CEO of Search123, one of the first pay-per-click search engines, which was acquired by ValueClick in 2003. Beriker spent four years at ValueClick, managing its search engine and search engine marketing businesses. He then served as President and CEO of Efficient Frontier, the leading global search engine marketing technology provider, which was acquired by Adobe in January 2012. He also served as President and CEO of Dapper, an innovator in leveraging data and real-time media buying to deliver personalized display advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo! in October 2010. Following the acquisition, Beriker remained at Yahoo! for two years, where he was responsible for the company’s dynamic creative and advanced performance-based targeting products, and the strategy, policy and third-party media acquisition functions for Yahoo!’s performance network. Most recently, Beriker was Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Matrix Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Palo Alto. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of iSocket, a platform for buying premium, guaranteed advertising, and EyeView, a provider of personalized advertising in video.
Simply Hired Board Member and Foundation Capital General Partner Ashmeet Sidana said, “We are delighted to have James join the Simply Hired team at this critical time in the evolution of the business and the recruiting industry. He believes in our mission of building a marketplace in which job seekers can find jobs they love and employers can efficiently source talent – and he brings the necessary passion, understanding of performance-based marketing and experience in scaling technology businesses to help accelerate our growth and drive leadership in the category.”
Gautam Godhwani, Simply Hired’s co-founder, who served as President and CEO since 2004, will assume the role of Chairman of the Board. Under Godhwani’s leadership,Simply Hired built a high-performance team, developed market leading search technology, significantly scaled its search traffic and employer base, and built a high growth, profitable business.
"Gautam and his team have developed a leading business in recruitment that is poised for significant growth,” said Foundation Capital’s Sidana. “On behalf of the Board, I’d like to thank Gautam for his significant contributions to, and passion for, the business. We all look forward to working with him in his capacity as Chairman.”
