SnagAJob.com Inc. has snagged $9 million in private-equity funding to more than quadruple its work force and build its brand.

Founded in 2000 by former attorney Shawn Boyer, SnagAJob is an online job recruiting company that helps people find hourly or part-time positions in retail, restaurant and other service industries.

Some of the Henrico County firm's clients include Target stores, Jiffy Lube, The Home Depot and Wendy's.
With the new cash infusion, SnagAJob will aggressively hire sales, marketing and tech workers. Boyer, the firm's president and chief executive, expects 76 employees by the year's end and 131 by next September. It currently employs 28.

SnagAJob also will promote itself with TV commercials in several large cities, outdoor and transit ads in Atlanta and Washington, and a sales campaign to lure more small and medium-size companies.

Boyer said yesterday that the company, which has more than 100,000 postings, will invest heavily in technology to handle what he expects will be a jump in monthly visitors to the site. SnagAJob gets about 1.5 million visitors a month; Boyer expects that to hit 9.5 million by 2009.

Therefore, SnagAJob doesn't heavily compete in the $3.5 billion online recruiting market with those more well-known job sites, said Gordon Borrell, president of Portsmouth-based media consulting firm Borrell Associates Inc., which has done work with the local company.

Many companies have their own career sites and more will introduce such services and pose competitive threats to SnagAJob, Borrell said. While he believes the local firm has carved a niche, it may also "find competition from the traditional media, like newspapers, who have always felt recruitment and help-wanted advertising are their own."
Boyer said SnagAJob's push into the hourly market has been strong enough to stay profitable since early 2004. It does not disclose financial figures but has seen triple-digit growth in revenue for five years of its six-year history, he said.

SnagAJob now is backed by Atlanta-based Croft & Bender's private-equity arm, along with Adams Street Partners and Baird Venture Partners, both out of Chicago. The deal that closed Monday is SnagAJob's first institutional investment.