NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – It may soon get easier for members of the MySpace generation to find a job.

News Corp., the media giant which owns the popular social networking site, announced Wednesday that it is making a strategic investment in Simply Hired, a privately held search engine that combs through online job listings.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has quickly built up his company's online operations through the purchase of MySpace, IGN, Scout and other online media firms.

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News Corp., through its Fox Interactive Media unit, is investing $3.5 million in the company. Venture capital firm Foundation Capital is investing $10 million. Simply Hired said that including these investments, the company has now raised a total of $17.7 million.

Simply Hired chief executive officer Gautam Godhwani said that News Corp.'s investment will give it a "substantial" stake in the company.

The investment by News Corp. (Research) is the latest in the company's aggressive push into online media. In addition to buying MySpace parent Intermix Media last year, News Corp. also recently purchased gaming and entertainment site IGN and Scout, a sports news and data site.

And more acquisitions and investments could be on the way. Since the MySpace purchase, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that the company intended to spend up to $2 billion on Internet deals.

"Fox Interactive Media's growth strategy is to strategically partner or acquire category leaders and technology innovators that broaden or enrich our users' experience," said Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media in a written statement. "Our investment in Simply Hired underscores that approach and we look forward to working with them to power job search for a variety of properties on our network."

The Simply Hired investment also could be a good fit for the company's newspaper publishing business as well, given the importance of classified ads to that business. News Corp. owns the New York Post and scores of publications across the globe.

Godhwani said that for now, Simply Hired, is focusing mainly on the U.S. job market but he did not rule out working more closely with News Corp. down the road in order to expand internationally.

The online job recruitment business is highly competitive with established leaders such as Monster.com (Research), Yahoo!'s (Research) HotJobs, and CareerBuilder, which is owned by a consortium of newspaper companies, all fighting for job listings.

But upstarts such as Simply Hired and Indeed have attracted attention because of their Google (Research)-like approach to the online job listing market. Employers don't pay to have their jobs posted on these sites as they do with Monster and others.

Instead, the companies simply coarse through existing listings at corporate Web sites, online classified and newspaper listings and job boards. Godwhani said that through mid-April, it had about 5.4 million jobs in its database, including listings posted on Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder.

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