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Online Job Board Gets A Bit More High Tech
from the might-as-well dept
While HotJobs is now helping Yahoo actually show a profit, a lesser known job site, Guru, has decided to reinvent the whole online job seeking business. Instead of competing with simple job boards that just let people put up resumes and jobs wanted, Guru went high tech to try to compete with human recruiters and headhunters. They hired an industrial psychologist and an AI expert to help design a system that went well beyond a job board. People who put up resumes are asked a number of questions which the system uses to build a profile. Companies posting jobs are also asked a number of questions - which are then used to build an automated questionnaire/test which is sent to qualifed candidates. Based on how the candidates do, only the top three qualified candidates are passed on to the company. Guru says they do this for about one third the cost of a comparable head hunter. It certainly sounds like an interesting model. I would be curious, though, to see how well it worked in practice.
Reader Comments
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Seen this before...
Isn't this the computerized dating of the '80s with "J2EE and XML" instead of "find dining and walks on the beach"? Your mileage may vary...
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No Subject Given
Maybe if someone used it. Of all the job sites I've tried, Guru has been the absolute LEAST useful. To the extent of being pointless and a waste of time. And I actually like the idea. But if no hiring managers/HR folk use it, what *is* the point?
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HotJobs helping Yahoo! Actually make a profit?
I'm sorry I couldn't get past that comment. Yahoo! payed 500 mil for HotJobs. HotJobs was barely breaking even for the last 2 years. -500 mil + even = profit? Mike you need to send that calculator back to Enron.
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Re: HotJobs helping Yahoo! Actually make a profit?
Damn those lost sarcasm tags. Read it again with sarcasm...
According to the statements in their latest quarterly report, Yahoo spent a lot of time focusing on how their diversification into service revenue helped them post a profit. Most of that "service" revenue came from HotJobs.
However, as I pointed out in the original post about Yahoo's profit, they basically spent half a billion dollars to get a tiny bit of revenue to show they eked out a profit from non-advertising sources. I'm agreeing with you. It's a joke.
Sarcasm is so tough.
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Re: HotJobs helping Yahoo! Actually make a profit?
I haven't read Yahoo's 10k on this acquisition, so I don't know the specific terms. But if it's a standard all-stock acquisition deal, it didn't cost them 500 million. That was the value of the stock they issued at the time of the acquisition. The actual cost to them -- the amount they had to take off their balance sheet -- was more likely zero.
This is why companies sometimes seem to favor acquisitions over internal development. Paying developers internally to build a product costs money, which comes straight out of income. But if you buy an outside company with stock, it's "free". And you can pick the existing winner in the market, rather than paying your internal team for your 1/n chance that they beat the other groups trying to do the same thing.
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