I lived in Dallas for years before launching RiseSmart in 2007. Then, 18 months after starting the company, I moved RiseSmart to Silicon Valley.

Because of this experience, I’m often asked by entrepreneurs in Dallas and elsewhere if and when they should move their startups to the Valley, too.

To answer some of the questions I’ve received, I wrote a post for Alexander Muse’s Texas Startup Blog. You can read it here.

When we exhibited at HRE’s HR Technology Expo — the biggest HR tech conference in the United States — last month, we noticed something interesting. We were the only outplacement services firm there.

There’s a reason for this. RiseSmart is in the process of disrupting the $3 billion-plus corporate outplacement market by, for the first time, bringing technology to bear to reduce the industry’s cost structure, while improving service delivery. Among our innovations, we search Web-based job listings on behalf of laid-off workers to help them find jobs — something none of the big players in outplacement do currently.

We’ve been fortunate, since moving our offices from Dallas to Silicon Valley last year, to have Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) in our corner. NVP invested $3 million in Series A funding, which has helped us to grow our business to build an impressive roster of clients, including some of the most forward-thinking companies in the Fortune 500.

Now we are delighted to welcome Storm Ventures as a RiseSmart investor. We announced today an additional $4.6 million in Series A funding, including $2.8 million from Storm Ventures and $1.8 million from NVP.

In addition, Storm Ventures managing director Sanjay Subhedar will join NVP’s Venkat Mohan and myself on our company’s board of directors.

From our press release, here’s what Sanjay and Venkat say of the deal:

“RiseSmart has created a business model that promises to be a game changer in the $3 billion plus outplacement industry,” Subhedar said. “RiseSmart’s Transition Concierge is disrupting the cost structure for corporate outplacement providers, while leveraging technology to deliver superior value to a growing roster of Fortune 500 clients. “

Said Mohan: “RiseSmart has grown rapidly since NVP made its initial investment in June 2008. The company has gone the extra mile to provide an excellent customer experience to both corporate clients and transitioning workers – and that has paid off in word of mouth and new business referrals.”

I can only express my deepest gratitude in the confidence Storm Ventures and NVP have shown in RiseSmart. We don’t intend to disappoint them.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 32 months since we founded RiseSmart in February 2007. Both because the time has flown by, and because we’ve accomplished so much in such a short period with the help of our employees, investors, business partners — and especially our customers.

We recently put together a fact sheet in preparation for our participation at the HR Technology Conference & Expo in Chicago next week (Booth 131 — come see us!), so I thought I’d share it here also:

RiseSmart Fact Sheet
• San Jose, Calif.-based RiseSmart is transforming the way companies provide outplacement services and individuals use the Web to find jobs.
• RiseSmart Transition Concierge, the company’s outplacement offering, was highlighted in an Aug. 20 Wall Street Journal story as a low-cost, high-tech alternative to traditional outplacement services.
• RiseSmart surveys of more than 300 workers in the spring and summer of 2009 gave Transition Concierge a 92 percent user satisfaction rate.
• An independent 2009 survey of 355 U.S. employers by the Institute for Corporate Productivity showed that the average employer paid more than $5,000 per executive or manager for three to six months of outplacement services – more than twice the cost of Transition Concierge.
• A 2008 survey by Kelton Research showed that online jobseekers who do not have the benefit of RiseSmart’s services are spending an enormous amount of time — an average of 50 hours per month — searching the Web for jobs.
• Founded in February 2007, RiseSmart has received $4.5 million in funding, including $3 million in Series A financing from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) in 2008 and $1.5 million in seed funding across 2007.
• The company’s leadership team includes Sanjay Sathe, founder and CEO; Dan Davenport, vice president of operations and finance; and Hitesh Shah, vice president of engineering. Venkat Mohan, general partner of NVP, serves with Sathe on the company’s board of directors.

Thanks for reading the RiseSmart Blog — and for following our progress.

I had the pleasure of talking with BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm recently about RiseSmart Job Concierge, our $100K job search service, and RiseSmart Transition Concierge, our corporate outplacement service. Here’s an excerpt from Steve’s blog post on RiseSmart:

The company, which Sathe launched in 2007, is still in early startup mode, but seems to be getting traction. It raised $3 million in series A venture funding late last year and now has 30 employees in Pune. The company has landed a couple of large corporations as customers, including Affiliated Computer Services …

The business model makes a lot of sense, and executives at ACS … sing RiseSmart’s praises. Now it’s ramp-up time. And, man, does RiseSmart have a lot of potential business on its plate…

The overall unemployment rate currently stands at 7.2 percent, a 15-year high according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It seems like every day since the current recession began in December 2007, the news has been full of reports of job layoffs. In fact, the government just released a report indicating that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits is at its highest level in a quarter of a century, as more workers seek government assistance.

Are you concerned you might be next? If so, a RiseSmart membership can keep you one step ahead of the game. That’s because RiseSmart was created with the needs of busy managers and executives in mind.

We know that if you’re currently in a job, it’s probably a demanding one — so demanding that the last thing you want to do when you get home from work is to spend hours searching for jobs online. This is particularly true if you’re worried about being laid off; it’s more critical than ever that you dedicate yourself to your current job to show your value to your employer.

But what happens if the rug gets pulled out from under you and you lose your job anyway? You’ll have to start your job search efforts from scratch. And for $100K+ jobs, HR experts say the average job search is taking six to nine months.

Can you afford to go that long — or longer — without a job?

Consider RiseSmart an insurance policy of sorts. Join RiseSmart while you still have a job, and then leave your online job search to us. You are free to focus completely on your current job, while RiseSmart searches for new opportunities for you. All you have to do is periodically check the customized list of job openings we find for you.

Here at RiseSmart, we add thousands of jobs a day to our job postings database — compiling job postings from all the Web job boards, corporate sites, recruiter networks and more. We have real people assigned to each subscriber’s account who go through our databases and provide you with results of relevant job matches. Then you can tell us which openings you like best, and we’ll find more like it.

In other words, we take the search out of your job search. So you can keep working at your current job — while we find your next one.

What are you waiting for? Try us for free today.

RiseSmart announced today the launch of AfterWallSt.com, a Web site dedicated to finding new jobs for workers displaced by Wall Street layoffs. Wall Street layoff victims who sign up at the site will receive one month of free job search help from RiseSmart, a $43.95 value.

We decided to create AfterWallSt.com because we don’t think laid-off financial services workers should be discouraged. They are among the most educated and talented workers on the market. And there are currently nearly a million senior-level management openings on the Web, including tens of thousands of $100K+ finance and accounting positions.

The bigger problem is that finding jobs using conventional job-search sites is time-consuming and inefficient — like searching for a needle in a haystack. This is the problem RiseSmart Job Concierge was created to solve.

RiseSmart Job Concierge is a subscription-based service for $100K+ jobseekers that assigns each member a dedicated HR professional who searches senior-level job listings across the Web, returning only the listings that best match the subscriber’s specific criteria. The RiseSmart Job Concierge team listens to customer feedback to continually enhance the results it delivers to each subscriber.

By signing up at AfterWallSt.com, laid-off Wall Street workers will receive one free month of RiseSmart Job Concierge service, a $43.95 value. Interested jobseekers should visit www.AfterWallSt.com.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss executive jobs and outplacement services on KPIX 5, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco. This is a five-minute talk with Sumi Das in which I overview our company’s services. Enjoy!

As a small number of companies, including the big job search engines, prepare to spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads this Sunday, I’m pondering a few questions about the search engines’ ad campaigns:

1. Are most jobseekers as miserable as CareerBuilder and Monster portray them to be — or is there something Freudian going on here? Maybe the truly miserable ones are the advertising agency creatives who can’t come up with a better reason to use the typical job board than, “You’re so desperate and unhappy — try us!” Of course, the idea that you could find relief from misery by searching for jobs online is a little ironic to us. RiseSmart customers come to us specifically because searching for jobs online makes them miserable.

2. What is it with TheLadders.com and CareerBuilder and the use of animals (and even monsters — yes, I get the joke) in place of actual people in their commercials? To paraphrase John Merrick, you are not an animal! You are a person, and chances are, your professional yearnings and desires are far more personal, and more important to you, than these ads — playing for laughs — would suggest. That’s why RiseSmart’s service is human-powered — with a real HR professional engaged in every job search on our customers’ behalf.

3. Is it really effective for TheLadders.com to work your ego so transparently? “We only work with the big talent,” the ad says. From what I can gather, as long as you plunk your money down, you’re in. Now, what they don’t bother to tell you in this ad is that they only have a small fraction of available $100K jobs on their site — because they charge employers to post listings. That’s the kind of exclusivity that can cost you a job — not find you one.

So as I sit back and watch Super Bowl XLIII on Sunday, I’ll take satisfaction in knowing that while the big search engines are offering jobseekers intangible benefits like a relief from misery or a stroke of the ego, we continue to focus on delivering what our customers want most: a job.

I was fortunate to be interviewed by Peter Clayton for his Total Picture Radio podcast. Listen to the podcast here.

We’ve been delighted at the attention we’ve received from news media and bloggers since our funding announcement on Tuesday. People are excited about the opportunity RiseSmart has to transform the way the Web works for $100K+ jobseekers, as well as for companies that are experiencing layoffs.

So please, tell a friend about RiseSmart — or sign up yourself today for a free three-day trial.

Here’s a sample of the coverage we have received:

VentureBeat:

While you may know TheLadders as a site to go to when you’re looking for $100K+ jobs, RiseSmart differentiates itself in that its human resource team searches for job matches on your behalf. Some people will undoubtedly appreciate that burden being lifted when compared to TheLadders, which focuses on self-search.

Mashable:

TheLadders.com claims it has about 35,000 recruiters and over 56,000 jobs while RiseSmart boasts a search of over 1.1 million listings across its sources, including Indeed, Jobster, CareerBuilder and Monster. It also includes many niche sites as well as the corporate sites of Fortune 1000 companies. The larger selection pool is a plus, especially since you aren’t the one sifting through it … If you’re going to pay for your job search, why not have other people do it for you?

The Deal:

Like peer TheLadders.com Inc. …, RiseSmart targets earners of six-figure salaries (and higher), but adds a wrinkle that allows people to search for jobs somewhat passively … RiseSmart’s Job Concierge product allows job seekers to enter their job preferences, then receive weekly reports of available jobs that match their desires…

San Jose Mercury News:

Silicon Valley startup called RiseSmart has raised $3 million in first-round funding from Norwest Venture Partners in a bid to outwit the outplacement industry … RiseSmart, [Sanjay] Sathe claims, can do a better job of helping people find new work at a fraction of the cost of the industry’s leaders…

RiseSmart typifies the valley’s knack for using technology to disrupt standard business practices. RiseSmart uses search technologies to scour and aggregate job postings that would be filtered to a client’s stated requirements, such as a locale or industry. Warm-blooded “human resources professionals” further refine the search, Sathe explained…

RiseSmart’s job transition package combines the “concierge” service with help in preparing résumés and marketing via social networks such as LinkedIn…

Cheezhead:

Sanjay Sathe, CEO of RiseSmart, said that while traditional job boards are struggling, RiseSmart is seeing success because their model is built around the job seeker. “The biggest problem for jobseekers is that finding the right job using job boards is extremely time-consuming and inefficient.,” Sathe said. “It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. This is the problem RiseSmart was created to solve.”

The announcement was also covered by the San Jose Business Journal, Dow Jones VentureWire, paidContent.org, Silicon Valley Wire, Alarm Clock, Texas TechPulse, and the New York Times DealBook, among other outlets.