My former employer, CareerBoard.com, has been acquired by UK-based JobServe. Click here for the story as told by Crain’s Cleveland Business. In a bright spot for Cleveland’s economy, the acquisition is projected to bring 100 new jobs to the company, up from 20.
JobServe also purchased Florida-based ComputerWork recently. I have to admit I had never heard of JobServe before (most likely due to their lackluster search rankings), but the feedback I’ve gotten from UK contacts has been largely positive.
CareerBoard was purchased by ATS provider HRsmart in March 2004. The company then spread into additional markets, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and Dallas. According to Alexa data, the growth failed to translate into increases in overall traffic. Time will tell if JobServe can halt the downward spiral.
Popularity: 2% [?]
May 11th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
If what Jobserve did in Australia is anything to go by then I wouldn’t be celebrating in Cleveland just yet. Jobserve purchased Australia’s leading IT job site “Jobnet” about 2 years ago and have since closed it down and done their best to migrate users to Jobserve. The result is that we lost a fantastic IT job board and had it replaced by a UK job board that hasn’t progressed much from the early 90s. There appears to be a big cultural disconnect between the UK site and the Australian users, and all in all it has been a disappointing result.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Hi Joel,
Thanks for HRSEO shout-out, the whole CareerBoard team is pumped about the JobServe acquisition. It will definitely be an exciting time for our company, and for Northeast Ohio, as we expand our team and grow across the country.
Quick note about our “downward spiral”. The Alexa graph you linked to shows the last 6-months of traffic – December ‘05 thru May ‘06. As you can imagine, our jobseeker traffic spikes at the beginning of new year as people make resolutions to actually get out of that job they’ve been complaining about for the last year. Plus who wants to look for a job when the sun is shining and it’s 70 degrees out. What you are seeing in that graph is more of a natural trend.
If you look at this Alexa graph – http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=careerboard.com#top – showing traffic over the last 2-years (CB was acquired by HRsmart in March 2004) it clearly shows positive growth during this period.
Hope all is well with you!