It looks like recruiting service Pursuit has been gobbled up by Facebook, the latest in a string of acqui-hires, judging by the brief message on their homepage:
“Update: we’ve found a new home at Facebook! Although we’ll be working on stuff unrelated to Pursuit, keep an eye out for great new features from us there and thanks to everyone who helped along the way.”
The San Francisco based Pursuit was just three extremely over-educated guys — Louis Eisenberg, Russ Heddleston, Nicholas Letourneau — who according to their digital “Gone Fishing” sign, will be dropping Pursuit in um, pursuit of other things at Facebook. This is not surprising, as Facebook acquisitions are almost always about engineering talent versus product.
Pursuit took a social angle to the career recruitment process, allowing you to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pursuit itself to refer people for jobs. Users who successfully referred applicants were given monetary bonuses and “karma points.” Hackruiter, Top Prospects and Facebook app Branch Out were also in the space.
I have contacted both Facebook and the founders for more information and will update this post as soon as I hear back.
Update: Both Facebook and the Pursuit founders tell me that no assets were acquired in the transaction and that part of the team was hired at Facebook, not acquired. “We just felt that joining FB was the better opportunity,” founder Heddleson told us.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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