Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In the venture capital-backed startup community—which of course includes Web 3.0 ventures such as semantic web-based services companies—the jobs picture in this jobless recovery has some spark to it. The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the job board StartUpHire.com—which focuses on opportunities at VC-backed companies—just celebrated Global Entrepreneurship week by releasing some stats around the job situation in these emerging organizations. It revealed that:

● Nearly 11,000 jobs are available at more than 2,500 venture-backed startups;
● Nearly 30 percent of those 11,000 jobs are in the software industry, followed next by IT services at nearly 19 percent; and
● Engineer, product development, science and QA roles are where the action is, with nearly 50 percent of job listings targeted to those areas; and
● California has the most job openings on StartUpHire.com at 39 percent, followed by Massachusetts (7.9 percent), New York (7 percent), Texas (6 percent) and Washington State (3.7 percent). Regionally, the Mid-Atlantic States have more collective jobs available at 13 percent than New England at 9 percent. The Southeast accounts for 8 percent of the opportunities on StartUpHire, more than the Mid-West (6 percent), Texas (6 percent) or the DC region (5 percent).

Semanticweb.com decided to explore what job seekers with expertise in the semantic web field might find open on the StartupHire.com jobs board. A search on the term ‘semantic web’ leads to 15 opportunities at VC-backed Web 3.0 startups, most of them in the engineering and development roles, including – not surprisingly – a couple of calls for linguistic processing specialists.

Semantic web guns for hire might be interested in the senior software developer opportunity at Evri. Or there’s a VP of engineering needed at ReputationDefender, which seeks out inaccurate, inappropriate or even slanderous information on individuals or companies on the Net and makes it go away. Its technology is proprietary but preference goes to candidates with sentiment analysis, semantic web, and/or natural language processing skills. And Kosmix is on the hunt for a techie who can help build its semantic categorization platform.

Narrow things down even further—search, for instance, on RDF—and your options slow down to a mere three, all in California. Broaden the search to the more general description of Web 3.0, and the world opens up to close to 3,000 employment opportunities.

While the life sciences sector—a combination of biotech and medical devices VC-backed companies—represented just 6.9 percent of all StartupHire jobs, the good news there is that salaries are generally higher, StartUpHire and the NVCA note. So those with semantic web skills might want to tune into that category in their searches, as well.

The pickings are slim so far when searching specifically for semantic opportunities in the sector. But for now, there’s at least an opening at Teranode. It’s looking for someone who has familiarity with semantic web technologies to take on a role in technical business development and software product management for presenting its semantic software technology integrated with Oracle and Microsoft platforms as solutions for helping scientists and IT specialists at pharma, biotech, and agribusiness companies support efforts such as drug discovery research processes. And if you search more generally on life sciences software opportunities, a couple of other positions that can leverage semantic web experience show up.

A new job for the holidays? That’s something to be thankful for.