With the Carl Icahn proxy fight averted and the Microsoft buyout dead (today, but check back tomorrow), Yahoo! can resume the reorganization it announced last month. It should be easier than most of the previous reorganizations the company went through as this time several top corporate positions are vacant.
(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)
For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The company’s official comment on its loss of senior leaders is: “Yahoo continues to be a leader in our industry and remains a unique, exciting, and important place to work even as we experience the attrition that’s to be expected in the Internet industry.” Bloggers scoffed at that comment.
We noticed, however, that the list contained only two HotJobs expatriates: Dan Finnigan, formerly general manager and now CEO of Jobvite (profile; site), and Mike DeLuca, who was VP of sales.
That’s either good news meaning HotJobs staff is happy and mostly unaffected by the morale issues swirling around the search part of the business. Or it means that HotJobs, historically a poor cousin to other parts of the Yahoo! empire, just isn’t getting much notice in the blogosphere either.
We suspect it’s more of the former, though “happy” may be too subjective an adjective. Certainly HotJobs has staged a stunning turnaround in the last two or three years. Traffic to the site has doubled and is growing, instead of declining. Revenues are up, thanks mostly to the hundreds of newspapers that have thrown in with the site as their job board partner.
Yahoo! doesn’t break out HotJobs revenue separately. So it’s not possible to say with precision how much it has grown since the launch of the consortium in late 2006. However, with around 800 newspapers participating to varying degrees, revenue can be expected to have tracked at least some fraction of the site’s 50 percent growth in traffic.