Yahoo has ben trying to unload HotJobs for a while, and it finally came to a deal with Monster, which will take the site off of Yahoo’s hands for $225 million in cash. As part of the deal, Monster will continue to power Yahoo’s job listings for three years.
Both Hotjobs and Monster have been lagging newer job search sites such as Indeed, which searches the entire Web for job listings. According to comScore, Indeed’s jog search reached 8.4 million individuals in the U.S. in December, 2009, compared to only 5.4 million for HotJobs and 6.1 million for Monster. Maybe with the acquisition, Monster can take the top spot again, although there is a lot of overlap in those numbers.
For Yahoo, it gets rid of a declining property, boosts to its cash position, and can focus on growth areas. Yahoo has been selling off or shutting dow non-core assets, including recently selling Zimbra to VMWare for $350 million, shutting down its Shopping API, and of course the long-awaited deal with Microsoft to hand over its search to Bing.
Monster recently launched its 6Sense semantic search technology across different products including resume and candidate search. 6Sense is aimed at bringing up more relevant results even when there is no exact keyword match by using semantic analysis and understanding the different ays that the same job or job requirements can be described. Monster needs all the help it can get. Today it announced fourth quarter revenues of $213 million, down 27 percent, and a net loss of $2.1 million. For the year, revenues were down 32 percent to $905 million. Full year net income was $19 million, compared to $125 million in 2008.
This is a long-anticipated but still very smart move by Yahoo. HotJobs is not central to Yahoo’s core portal business. This way it gets to unload the costs of maintaing the service, some cash now and some cash later.
It seems like Yahoo is focused on Technology instead of classifieds/media, but can Technology still be used to grow a job site, perhaps something like Linkedin or Indeed search, which act more like a platform for finding jobs, instead of just serving job ads.
The timing is very strange!
Selling a recruitment site at the bottom of an employment recession? Carol could have realized millions more for shareholders in a couple of years.
Way to go yahoo! You just sold another pizza slice of your company! I wonder when will you sell Flic.kr? So finally, you’ll be forgotten by the whole netizens… !
See why Yahoo is going to damn-nation! Details: http://bit.ly/is-carol-bartz-a-loser
I dissagree this was a smart move… recruiting and job sites will soon be back to where they were in the late ’90s… busy, busy, busy
That’s interesting… I’ve been out of the job hunt world for a while, so to me this is like McDonalds buying Burger King.
I wonder how Craigslist’s job sections and LinkedIn compare to Monster/HotJobs.
Good move by Monster, late move by Yahoo, could have sold it for more if they did this sooner.
Another Yahoo turnover? Yahoo is dying slowly…
yahoo loosing its position in many departments..
Job sites dont work I been using jobsites for the last 8 year posting my resume and sending out thousand of resume but at the end of the day I still unemploy.
perhaps you’re overqualified.
What I enjoy most about Yahoo’s moves is the point when Search stopped being a core product.
Typo – “Indeed’s jog search”
Yahoo made the deal of the century.
HotJobs is full of sapm, bot, fake jobs ads and total junk!
So is Monster, so this is a match made in heaven. I avoid both sites when job hunting. Indeed is a good at aggregating results from other sites, but that just leads me back to the same old sites I usually hit.
The internet job boards are the worst place for employees to find jobs. Full of scams.
Internet job boards are also the worst place for employers to try to find employees: information overload.
Is this part of well thought strategy to focus on certain vertical, e.g. online content & publishing, or just a slash and burn-survive-as-long-as-you-can plan.. remains to be seen.
So Yahoo is selling off bits and pieces that are non part of their core business.. search, jobs, shopping and so on. What is Yahoo going to look like at the end of all the sell offs and shutdowns?
I think the more interesting question is what they’ll look like after a couple acquisitions.
Didn’t they try that already?
you mean like when they acquired hotjobs?
A division inside Facebook.
Long live what is left of Yahoo…
Monster purchased AffinityLabs communities earlier and now Yahoo’s job search… sounds like a page out of Amazon’s book.
If only the networks were as connected as Amazon’s.
This move proves that Job Search Engines like Indeed are where the future is.
Good move by anyone who jumped out of the boards.
I’m not sure this would be a good move for Monster. It’s a volume move, sure. I think Yahoo wins on this one in terms of dropping off a project for good cash. What does hotjobs bring to monster that’s worth 225 million?
Correction: Indeed is a company that scrapes other job boards so in theory it HAS to have the most traffic as it is aggregating the jobs from all job boards into one. It does NOT generate traffic on its own to beat any of the major job boards.
Huh? Why would Indeed HAVE to have more traffic? Simply Hired and Juju are the same and they hardly have any traffic.
another Yahoo yard sale?
Smart move employment is a deadpool industry.
HotJobs was hugely popular before Yahoo bought them, then became nothing after the sale.
That seems like a bad deal on Monster’s end. Afterall, 99% of the jobs posted on HotJobs were “Work from Home…earn $5,000/week!” schemes.
Oh wait. That was CareerBuilder. Either way, HotJobs was and will remain useless.
This is Yesterdays News buying Yesterdays News
This is a win for Yahoo! Hot Jobs, Career Builder, Monster, et al, are poor businesses with very bad fundamentals that rarely get proper attention. From bogus “jobs” to infinite supply of unqualified candidates, there’s no side of the job board transaction (candidate or employer) that’s actually winning. Most are losing. Either by wasted time searching for jobs or wasted time reviewing and responding to unqualified candidates–plus the associated subscription fees.
Employers tend to discount the value of anyone found on a job board right off the top. The implied message of a candidate posting their resume or applying to a job on the board is that they can’t possibly be a highly qualified professional as those types have networks through which they gain employment–not blindly sending off resumes to an uninformed recruiter in the middle of the night.
Measure the results and you’ll see one of the poorest returns on a recruiting budget. Of course the salespeople won’t come armed with real data (just number of jobs posted and how many “qualified” candidates applied). Typically, a basic metric like actual hires against requisitions would be alarmingly poor return. Dig a level deeper and check retention across a year–investment just reduced further. Go a level deeper and stack rank your best quality of hire and I promise job boards will be at or near the bottom of the stack.
And I have yet to meet a person in the last 5 years that claims they got their job from a job board.
At best, affinity networks with job boards built into them are possible winners. At least they tend to filter out a lot of otherwise unqualified candidates by way of their specialized content and off-the-grid position.
So I say good job Yahoo! for getting rid of a lousy business with limited potential and a host of disingenuous practices as an industry.
Brian, enjoyed your comment.
Where does this position LinkedIn in the “job” site category? They could make a run at it, or maybe they just keep doing what they are doing, seems to be working pretty well.
No offense Brian, but your comment sounds like a typical one from someone that only understands recruiting for start-up tech people. More mainstream jobs (i.e. finance, marketing, sales, etc.) get closed through big job boards ALL the time. And if it was truly as unsuccessful as you’re making it out to be, then why would it continue to be a multi-billion dollar business?
I used to own a recruiting agency that I eventually sold, and while traditional boards like Monster, etc. are a pain in the ass sometimes, they’re not as fruitless as you make them out to be. Remember, there are plenty of candidates in the $60K-$100K level in finance, marketing, sales, and HR that are “passively-actively” looking, which means they are quality candidates that don’t have time to respond to job postings, yet they want it known that they’re looking. Resume searches on those boards can actually deliver some pretty high ROI’s.
Brian, while we cannot address your generalized perception regarding other job search sites, your comments regarding Monster couldn’t be further off the mark. First, Monster’s patented 6Sense semantic search technology, officially introduced earlier this week, provides employers and job seekers with more precise search results and better matches than ever before…check out some of the headlines from Search Engine Watch (Monster’s 6Sense Technology Fuels Innovation in Job Search) and ERE.net (Monster’s new resume search is a winner). We do agree with you on one point: “affinity networks with job boards built in are possible winners”…precisely why Monster acquired Affinity Labs, building 20 professional career networks into Monster Communities, pairing career relevant content and networking opportunities for people who really care about the work they do. Our proposed acquisition of HotJobs from Yahoo! brings together the respective strengths of the two businesses, offering what we believe will be far greater opportunities, convenience and results for employers and job seekers than ever before. Botton line: we are bringing more precise, relevant jobs to our seekers and more qualified seekers to our employers.
Kathy O’Reilly, Monster.com
Kathy/Mark,
No offense (and none taken), but I’ve done some extensive quantified research with well over 2,000 different global (read large, not start-up) companies. Across multiple lines of business units, geographies, professional tenure, and function within a given organization. Literally millions of pieces of data collected and analyzed across numerous potential sources of hire and job boards perform at or near the bottom of the list consistently.
I understand a need to defend a business model (especially as this is your job Kathy) and I understand the ability to buy into certain “research” to produce favorable ratings. I’m not stating this doesn’t make for a short term business opportunity, but that also doesn’t negate the fact that the fundamentals of the current job board business couldn’t be more problematic for company, candidate and job board operator.
Mark, just as weight loss fads have been proven ineffective over the long haul–but people still buy into them–so go the fundamentals for the current “old guard” in the job board business. Can they change? Sure. Will they? A few will. The rest will take their aging business model with the marketing data they’ve collected from candidate data and ride it for the last mile–and then go away.
So while you’re certainly entitled, and at some level mandated to sing the praise of the company, even a cursory check of your true constituents would immediately yield something less worth of being so defensive. At the end of the day I’ll take great confidence in my research and watch the events unfold.
Victor, LinkeIn has an incredible opportunity in front of them that they continue to squander. They’ve had a head start most companies would trade near 100% equity to have, but they are at great risk of getting it taken from them. In the words of a subject I interviewed for some recent research on LinkedIn said “They think they are in the cat’s bird seat, but they are running a sh*t show over there.” I think that loosely translates into they don’t understand what we need as hiring managers and companies and it’s frustrating because they have the goods but won’t listen. Remains to be seen. I’ll say this, while they make money now, I can’t imagine how much more they could have made by now if they’d really gotten aggressive about unlocking the value of their database.
Thanks for the debate folks. Keep it all in perspective. There *are* real problems that need solving as well.
Indeed may be dominating, but what are they actually earning? Can they be earning anywhere near $300M a year?
we’re still trying… we’re basic as can be and all free…but it is slow going… ;-( ….any real ideas? (ah besides giving up or shutting down)
Like JonBovi.net said……where is the income comes from indeed?..advertisement?? I only see google Ads though..
Both Indeed and Simplyhired have their own ad networks running on the site – in the form of premium jobs. Job posters can bid on keywords/phrases (ie java engineer) and pay per click.
Monster would become a bigger monster now with the large base of both employees and employers!
This has been discussed since 2000. Monsters strength in 2009 was its global reach; its main competition is “the network” that is/was partnered with yahoo… this move may eliminate/affect some global competition. Indeed and Simply Hired branched out globally in 2009 and I imagine will continue to give the boards a fight for traffic and results.
Yet another acquisition. Opportunities for monster to grow bigger.
Both Hotjobs and Monster have been lagging newer job search sites such as Indeed, which searches the entire Web for job listings.
One fairly inefficient job board buying another? Doesn’t make much sense at all. Why buy up a competitor that was dead in its tracks anyways? They should use that money to try and innovate.
As usual a fairly US centric view on performance. Monster may be lagging in the US, but it is still the number one global job site, and has been since around 2001. The revenue numbers prove it, even after taking a hit like that…
But guess what, we are/were in a recession and with recent technology moves and now this traffic acquisition move Monster would seem very well placed to capitalise on the inevitable economic upturn.
Keep an eye on the Monster Employment Index as a leading indicator of when that upturn comes – and thats when the competition in this space will really be on.
Disclaimer : I am not an employee, but used to be…