One of the largest networks of company-owned job boards in the world has just grown a little bigger. Beyond.com announced this morning it acquired Human Capital Solutions, parent company of JobCircle.com, for an undisclosed amount.
JobCircle, like Beyond itself, operates in dozens of regional areas, primarily in the mid-Atlantic states from Virginia to New York, though it serves parts of other states, including California, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii.
The Beyond network — some 2,500 niche and regional sites, and national specialty sites — also covers these areas. With 12 million unique visitors a month, the network is several times larger than JobCircle, and ranks, says CEO Rich Milgram, as the fourth-most trafficked in the careers category, according to ComScore. keep reading…
The war for technical talent is so intense that a handful of firms like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Apple, Twitter, and Zynga have shifted to a powerful but rare recruiting sub-strategy known as acqui-hiring. It involves established firms acquiring startup firms not for their products (only Facebook admits it) but instead primarily to capture an entire team of talented engineers and designers at once.
Marissa Mayer
If in the past after reading about an announcement of an acquisition you’ve wondered to yourself why a technical giant was bothering to buy a startup with no profit, a seemingly unrelated product, and a product that was in a completely different field, now you know why. The strategy has recently received some added publicity because Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer recently announced that she was going to adopt the strategy used by her former employer Google, a king of acqui-hires. Mark Zuckerberg has boasted that “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people” (“Engineers are worth half a million to one million” — V Smith).
Acqui-hiring (acquisition hiring) is in direct contrast to most traditional corporate hiring, which simply doesn’t work when you are recruiting innovators who prefer startups over what they consider to be onerous “corporate jobs.”
The Benefits of an Acqui-hire Strategy keep reading…
At once swooping up two of its largest competitors, Bullhorn today became one of the largest, if not the largest, technology providers to staffing and independent recruiting firms in the world.
Describing it as “an incredible moment for Bullhorn customers,” company CEO Art Papas announced the acquisition of both MaxHire and Sendouts.
“We’re acquiring two extremely talented teams, both of whom have succeeded in delighting their large customer bases with a combination of product innovation and excellent service,” Papas said in a news release. “These acquisitions dramatically increase our ability to execute on our vision of helping recruiters be more successful, develop new products, and serve our exponentially expanding user base.”
Details of the sale weren’t disclosed, however both MaxHire and Sendouts will operate under the Bullhorn brand. MaxHire’s CEO Peter Blitz, who founded the company in 1995, will become Bullhorn’s product innovation officer. Sendouts’ CEO Brian Hopcroft will become general manager.
Customers of each company will continue to use the existing software and will be supported as they always have, assured Andrew Hally, Bullhorn’s vice president of product and marketing. “Both products (MaxHire and Sendouts) are staying… We are not shutting down the products,” Hally explained, though the individual companies will immediately be folded into Bullhorn. keep reading…
A quick update on struggling Jobfox, one of the first companies to enter the business of matching employers with job candidates, eHarmony style: Doostang, the community directed at young people, has bought certain Jobfox assets.
Jeff Berger, Doostang’s CEO, has had his eye on Jobfox for a long time. Doostang, which boasts more than a million members, is not going to continue operating the previous Jobfox website. But, Berger says via email, “as part of the acquisition, we own the domain and are using it to offer a new job alert service. However, our primary interest in Jobfox was the technology and how we could integrate some of the pieces on Doostang.”
Jobfox, in addition to being one of the first in the now-crowded matching business, also had that idea I mentioned about “recruiter networks” for passive candidates to keep in touch with recruiters even before they’re ready to switch jobs.
With the acquisition announced today of Indeed.com, Recruit.com has taken a major step toward becoming a worldwide recruitment powerhouse, directly challenging CareerBuilder, Monster, and Indeed’s most direct competitor, SimplyHired, for a share of the global employment advertising market.
A curiously eclectic conglomerate with holdings in the B2C classifieds and direct sales marketplace, Recruit has been moving aggressively to expand its human resources market, and broaden its footprint from Asia Pacific and especially Japan where it is headquartered. In the last two years, the company spent more than $700 million buying American staffing firms, establishing its first U.S. presence while simultaneously become one of the top four or five staffing firms in the world.
Recruit already was the dominant staffing and placement firm in Japan, where it operates both job boards and employment agencies. It also owns a piece of 51Jobs, the leading publicly traded job board in China. Buying Indeed, the No. 1 or No. 2 most trafficked job board in the world (depending on what’s counted and how), Recruit leaves no doubt it intends to be a global player.
“I think that’s their goal,” said Paul Forster, co-founder and CEO of Indeed. “We are the No. 1 job site worldwide, which makes us a good fit with the company plans … They are looking to Indeed to be their tech platform worldwide.” keep reading…
One of the largest networks of company-owned job boards in the world has just grown a little bigger. Beyond.com announced this morning it acquired Human Capital Solutions, parent company of JobCircle.com, for an undisclosed amount.
