The Mountain View, California-based firm said Tuesday, October 28, that it was beginning the sites, and that they would include job listings gathered from the leading job boards, content Web sites, newspapers, organizations and company career pages from those four countries. The four sites together will feature more than 1.5 million job listings, according to the company.

Simply Hired may find its foreign foray to be a struggle initially because of the economic turmoil gripping much of the globe, said recruiting analyst Peter Weddle. But Weddle, who also is executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites trade group, said going abroad should eventually pay off given an increasingly borderless labor market.

“The timing isn’t auspicious in the short term,” Weddle said. “But in the long term, it’s exactly the right kind of move.”

Simply Hired is a “vertical search engine,” or job aggregator, meaning it collects job listings from companies and job sites. The ad-supported site says it has more than 7 million jobs worldwide, including the more than 1.5 million listings at the new sites. By gathering job listings from around the Web, Simply Hired aims to provide a “one-stop shop” for job seekers.

Beginning the new international sites “is an integral part of Simply Hired’s effort to expand our mission in building the largest worldwide job search engine,” Gautam Godhwani, chief executive of Simply Hired, said in a statement. “We want to continue making the job search process a positive experience globally and leverage the successful business model we have built in the U.S.”

Simply Hired said recruiters and employers can add their jobs to the international sites through a job feed. They also can advertise their employment brand through display ads that appear on relevant search result pages.

Simply Hired isn’t just focused on English-speaking countries. The company says it supplements networking site LinkedIn’s job board “with millions of job listings from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, France, Germany and Spain.”

Simply Hired’s new sites have the following addresses: www.SimplyHired.ca, www.SimplyHired.co.uk, www.SimplyHired.com.au, and www.SimplyHired.co.in.

Simply Hired isn’t the only recruitment industry player to look beyond the United States. Job board giant Monster Worldwide, for example, has invested in foreign markets including China. Monster’s “Careers International” revenue—which reflects the firm’s career-related services in Europe and Asia—has been growing fast and now accounts for 44 percent of the company’s revenue.

But the financial crisis that began in the U.S. in recent months appears to be spreading globally. Weddle said the hardest time to enter a foreign market is during difficult economic times. But the Simply Hired expansion demonstrates that searching for talent these days transcends borders. “This is yet another indication that we’re in a global labor market,” he said.

—Ed Frauenheim

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