Knight Ridder Newspapers

Fired from your job? You could curl up in bed.

Or you could go out there and tell the world. A Web site launched last month called SimplyFired.com is encouraging people to share their stories about the cruelty of the workplace – or their own stupidity. All they have to do is e-mail their stories in, in 200 words or less.

“This is another way to give candidates a chance to talk about something that’s normally sensitive or causes a lot of stress,” said Chief Executive Gautam Godhwani. “It’s a way to have them share what they’re feeling and help them feel they’re not alone.”

Of course, the question is: How do you make money from people being out of work?

Simply Fired hopes to do it by funneling users over to its sister site, SimplyHired.com, a Mountain View, Calif.-based job search engine. The company hopes the age-old adage “misery loves company” will attract troops of the downtrodden and then send more online traffic to the ad-based job site.

Simply Hired provides free searches of more than 3.5 million listings culled from other online job boards, newspaper listings and company Web sites. The site just launched in March, and plans to sell job market data to employers.

Eventually, Simply Fired hopes to get sponsorship for its site from people in the employment industry or outplacement firms. Good luck, said Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

“I don’t know what kind of company would want to advertise on there,” she said. “But it is a way to draw traffic and gain notoriety.”

The new site is an outgrowth of Simply Hired’s forums, which were launched this summer and already account for 5 percent of the site traffic. Users post messages on 16 boards carrying categories like “Interview ooops” and “Hate your boss or job?”

The message boards play on the idea that people love to talk about job problems. Monster.com has hosted forums since 1999 and today has 29 career message boards. Its “VENT!” message board included 110 postings in the past month that contained the word “fired.”

Sure, Simply Fired is a gimmick, as was a contest for the funniest true story about getting axed. The company promised to award the “Grand Prize Loser” a trip for two to New York, where they would be guests on a Caribbean cruise featuring cast-offs from “The Apprentice.”

Indeed.com, the biggest competitor to Simply Hired, shuns such strategies.

“The best way to serve job seekers and the best way to attract traffic to our site is not through these kinds of ancillary activities but by providing the most comprehensive search and the best results,” said Paul Forster, chief executive of Indeed.com.

But analyst Li said the Simply Fired site could be a smart way to build brand as competition heats up with Indeed.com. Since neither site is well-known yet, “it’s still very much an open game,” she said.

“It’s good PR,” Li said. “You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it’s not going to work.”

The honor of the first posting on the site goes to Mark Jen, an associate product manager whom Google fired in January after he wrote unflattering and somewhat sensitive insights about the company on his personal blog. He alluded to financial strength and wrote that the company’s free meals and other perks were “thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work.”

Jen, 22, asked readers of his blog what they thought about him getting axed. Within five hours he received 19 comments, ranging from “Quite unfortunate, something similar has happened to me. Best of luck to you,” to “Suck it up Jen – you blabbed and got tossed. Welcome to the real world.”

Now Jen, who worked all of two weeks at Google, has a new job as a producer at Plaxo. He’s sharing more of his thoughts on SimplyFired.com.

“Hopefully it’s a site that will help people express their feelings,” said Jen, who appreciated receiving supportive comments, “so they won’t feel so bad about it.”