WorkZoo acquisition: not a good sign for Jobster
Today Jobster announced the acquisition of WorkZoo. It's a bad sign for Jobster.
When a company with a new busines model, flush with capital from external sources, acquires yet another business with a new business model, it speaks of a lack of focus and perhaps a bit of concern on the part of management for their initial venture.
I've met the Jobster team and they seem like very nice guys. What I haven't heard from them yet is a convincing explanation of how Jobster has learned the lessons from refer.com, referrals.com and Bounty Systems; and how the times or the technology or the tools have changed to make for Jobster's place in the sun.
And having been in the corporate development seat at HotJobs for a couple years, I got to see all the businesses up for sale float past. Cruel World (I liked that one a lot, terrible name, great resources); Techies (barf barf barf); FlipDog ($4 mm in revenue: cool! $30 mm ask price: mmmm, let Monster.com buy you).
And what I learned was that a management that diverted its focus from its new, cool thing, to the next cool thing, would always be excellent at identifying cool new things.
What they wouldn't generally be excellent at is turning those cool things into huge successful businesses with lots of customers and cashflow.
Our goal at Jobster is to power a new and more efficient system for online recruiting; one that enables employers to proactively reach the right person with the right job at the right time through a variety of highly targeted channels while also empowering qualified job seekers to stand out from the pack and get hired.
Well, I'm not certain at all that I understand how a job scraper helps connect recruiters to the right folks, so I hope I'm missing something here and there's an amazing rationale that's been in place all along.
UPDATE: By the way, it's cool when a vendor to the industry isn't afraid to state his mind. David Manaster at ERE notes that he doesn't think Jobster's concept is all that revolutionary. I suppose the refer.com guys would agree with him!
