The new round of financing was led by DAG Ventures, with participation from current funders Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Battery Ventures, and brings the company’s total amount raised to $42.2 million.

Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO of Glassdoor, said that 40 percent of the company’s traffic is already international even though the site only offers its reviews, salary comparisons and other content in English. But, with the new cash, it plans to invest even further in its overseas audience.

“People consume this content globally and they’re willing to contribute to it globally,” he said. “We believe that this will fuel a whole other wave of growth for the company.”

Glassdoor, which is free to job seekers and can be integrated with Facebook as of earlier this year, offers two key products to paying partners: a brand and analytics package that enables a company to manage its presence on the site and a performance-based product for targeting job listings to potential candidates.

Hohman said the new financing will also be used to support its sales force and further expand its roster of paying customers, which has grown from 120 to 800 companies in the past year.

Job seekers may also use LinkedIn as a resource when looking for or researching professional opportunities, but Hohman said Glassdoor’s commentary is more authentic and candid than LinkedIn’s, which tends to be only positive. In the past couple of years, career sites like BranchOut and Identified have launched to target younger professionals, but those are more focused on social networking than reviews and job data.

In the past year, the company said, traffic to Glassdoor has climbed 145 percent to more than 13 million monthly unique visitors and revenue has grown 175 percent.  To date, people from 190 countries have contributed three million pieces of data on 220,000 companies.

Image from r.nagy via Shutterstock. 

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The San Francisco-based company, which was launched in 1999 as a job listing site for entry level positions and internships, is refashioning itself for the social era with a new networking layer targeting college-age users.

In any given year, the company said, more than 3 million college students and recent graduates use AfterCollege to search through about 200,000 listings, using its algorithms to find the most relevant jobs.  With the new social network, students will be able to connect with classmates, professors, administrators, alumni and employers to receive job opportunities, recommendations and advice.

Roberto Angulo, the company’s co-founder and CEO, is well aware that LinkedIn is already gunning for this audience, with a career path exploration tool, new student profile sections and, more recently, a College Pilot Program. But, he says research shows that while students may be joining LinkedIn, they’re not really making full use of it.

“Students were saying, ‘we know we have to be on LinkedIn when we’re out in the working world’ but the only thing they’d use it for is a profile, because they have no one to connect it to,” he said.

Given AfterCollege’s connections with colleges (16,000 academic departments at 2,300 schools) and employers (20,000), Angulo said, the company decided to build a social network on top of its site that gives students something like an instant network. If a student whose college or academic department is on AfterCollege joins the site, she’ll be immediately connected to her classmates and professors, instead of being forced to search for contacts (or be found) a la LinkedIn.

The company makes money by charging employers a subscription fee to post job listings on the site. Angulo said that unlike CareerBuilder, Indeed and other job sites, his company lets employers target students by academic department. AfterCollege, which has been profitable since the early 2000s, received a small angel round close to its launch in 2000, and  last year raised less than one million dollars in Series A financing from Flywheel Ventures to build out its social network.

For AfterCollege, which has maintained an unstructured network of students and employers, the addition of networking layer makes sense from business and trend perspectives. The company can make additional revenue by charging employers for direct access to students and it brings the site more in line with the connected Web students are now accustomed to experiencing.

But, considering LinkedIn’s growing dominance in the job networking space, I don’t think AfterCollege is going to unseat LinkedIn anytime soon as the professional networking site for college students and recently graduated users. A quick poll among the few people in my life who are in that demographic anecdotally supports Angulo’s observation that LinkedIn’s youngest users aren’t using it for more than building a profile. But, over time, as more young alumni join the platform, it could increasingly provide a more robust experience for young users. Also, if LinkedIn is going to be the place where college students eventually maintain professional relationships for the rest of their working lives, it makes more sense for them to build networks with classmates and professors in an environment with longevity instead of a place like AfterCollege that targets just one chapter of a person’s career.

While LinkedIn is building up its college-age membership and it has the potential to be a powerful resource for students, the site appears to have a ways to go in getting them to really engage.

(Image from hxdbzxy via Shutterstock.)

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GigaOM was the first to report on the development of the “Apply with LinkedIn” plug-in in early June. By the looks of it, the plug-in that has been deployed has many of the features we had heard about pre-launch: Companies can customize the look of the button, add up to three specialized questions, prompt for a cover letter, and utilize certain data tracking technologies.

Now any company can embed the plug-in by adding an eight-line code snippet to its corporate website, LinkedIn said. More than a thousand companies are participating in the plug-in’s launch by including the Apply with LinkedIn button on their job pages, including Netflix, TripIt and Photobucket.

In a post published on LinkedIn’s corporate blog Monday morning, technical project manager Jonathan Seitel explained the service from the job applicants’ perspective this way:

Once you click on the “Apply with LinkedIn” button, you’ll get a user experience that’s been optimized for the web. In addition to updating your profile real time, LinkedIn will also show you your professional connections that work at the company to increase your chances of getting hired through a referral.

If you don’t know anybody at the company, we’ll show you people who can introduce you to someone there. This is extremely powerful –- statistics show that referrals are the #1 source of external hires at companies.

Finally, we record all “Apply with LinkedIn” submissions in the “Saved Jobs” tab (under the Jobs category on LinkedIn) so you have a record of all the jobs you’ve applied to around the web, throughout your career.

Here is a YouTube video explaining how “Apply with LinkedIn” works:

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