All but given up for dead when it failed to sell itself, Monster today showed there’s life yet in the venerable job board.
The company announced it bought recruiting startups TalentBin and Gozaik. The terms were not disclosed, but whatever the deal, it isn’t large enough to trigger a disclosure filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Nor did Monster say how it intends to integrate the companies.
“The acquisition of TalentBin and Gozaik completes one key component of a larger strategy designed to help our business grow,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Monster Worldwide. “We look forward to sharing more details about these plans at our investor briefing event later this year.”
Just a few weeks ago during the quarterly financial presentation, Iannuzzi hinted at new strategies for the careers company. But he demurred when he was asked for specifics.
Now, with the acquisitions, at least some of the broader dimensions of that strategy are visible.
TalentBin is a social profile search tool for sourcing tech and — increasingly — scientific talent. It pulls in data from multiple sources — as diverse as Quora and the U.S. Patent Office — to create candidate profiles. Since coming out of beta as TalentBin in 2012 (it previously had different names and a different business model), it’s gained more than 200 customers including such heavyweights as Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Facebook, Microsoft. and UPS.
TalentBin is good, and has been rapidly growing its offerings. Beginning with a few sites and specializing only in tech talent, TalentBin has expanded the sites it crawls to more than 100 and is moving into pharma and biotech. However, it competes in a crowded field with sites like Gild, Entelo and others. A new profile aggregator seems to launch almost monthly.
However, its most direct competitor is Dice’s Open Web. Both TalentBin and Open Web are tech focused, but Open Web has the advantage of incorporating Dice’s 1 million plus tech resumes into its searches. Now that TalentBin will have easy access to Monster’s tens of millions of resumes, the competition at least in the tech area between the two career sites will heat-up.
Gozaik is a different sort of search service. Launching just last year, Gozaik aggregates job postings from Twitter and makes them searchable for job seekers. It also gave them a place to create a more dynamic profile than do most of the career sites. For recruiters, Gozaik helps them finesse short job announcements that are particularly suited to Twitter’s short message format. Using Twitter’s burgeoning glossary of hashtags, Gozaik targets the job “posting” to the group or groups most appropriate.
The future of the site is unclear, though its likely Monster will leverage Gozaik’s Twitter targeting ability, integrating it into its Career Ad Network. At this point, however, the Gozaik site is mostly offline, limited to a splash page saying the company has been sold.
