Rambling on About Job Board Acquisitions, CareerBuilder, Monster, and the Dutch. Also Some Gifs.

Okay, so: job boards. Sexy. As. Hell. Amiright? The only thing sexier, in my ‘umble, is ATS.

Right? I mean, yeah. MMMM, ATS… supply chain technology: but applied to people. Yeah  baby!

Anywho. Job boards. Lately, lotsa people have been snatching them up. Monster. SimplyHired. LinkedIn (and yes, LinkedIn: you are a job board/ resume database, just with a social angle). Now CareerBuilder’s on the verge. Heck, even Indeed is owned by somebody else at this point.

Here’s the funny bit: only one of the aforementioned companies sold at a premium  (CB may, but I’d bet my hat – if I had one – that it’s going to be a bit of a fire sale). LinkedIn sold for a ton more than the one I’m thinking of, but it was at 2/3 of the valuation they’d been at just twelve months prior.

Indeed. Indeed did it. They took a total of $5 million in funding, and turned it into a billion dollar exit. That’s… impressive.

Here’s the next bit: Indeed did that, without trying to become a CRM/ analytics/ ATS/ career site/ whatever-product-we-can-throw-at-the-wall company. “Oh, you say you want HCM?? We can try to do that! Wait, you want ATS, sure, we can screw that one up, too! Hey, maybe we’re into social now! Whadda think about that? PLEASE LOVE US AGAIN!”

Indeed knew what they were: a job board. One that figured out that Google is actually the world’s real job board, and everyone else is just a node off of that simple little black and white box. Getting to the top of the list, and in front of us attention-starved humans

is all that matters, in the end. So they got really, really good at SEO. And then they got the dolla dollas. As they should have.

So…. what the hell? Sorry. I keep looking at that weird-ass, and yet alluring in way that I know you all understand (even if you’re loathe to admit it) squirrel.

Right: job boards.  They’re on fire right now. Only not in the good way….

(I’d promise to stop with the gifs… but then I’d be a dirty, dirty liar)

Why is that, exactly? Well, to my mind, screwing up your core business is never good. It’s hard to recover when you ignore emerging competitive models, your industry, and then treat your customers like idiots that were only good for milking.

And that’s they play most all of them made. And then, instead of saying “Hey, our bad, we’re going to refocus on our core business, pricing, delivery, service, and fix them”, they said:

“Nah, fuck that. We’re just gonna make a bunch of poorly thought out acquisitions. Buy lots of product companies, many of which suck worse than we do at their core business (and we’ll admit that’s actually kind of impressive). Overpay for nearly of them. Heck, we might even just outsource one of the most important parts to a b-player technology, then put our name on it so we can take the body blows when it sucks wind. Oh, yeah, and then we’re going to not bother with integration, so people won’t even know that some of these products are ours. Heck, they can even have a booth completely separate from ours, at the major trade shows, to further confuse our buyers. And then, we’re going to make sure all these products don’t have a unified code base.

Because, why make it easy for our products to, you know, actually talk to each other?“

There’s a word for what you get when you do that…. wait… it’ll come to me….

Ehh, never mind. I’ll figure it out eventually.

Now, I’m not saying it’s foolish to buy them. Not at these prices. There are some good deals in there. Monster’s new PPC offering works really well – we’re seeing good success with it with our clients. CareerBuilder’s Talentstream Supply & Demand tool works well – that said, as a former client of it, getting people to use it was… challenging. And they hold a majority stake in Textkernel, which is interesting.

Love me some Textkernel.

Ahem. Anyways. Occurs to me there’s a weird Dutch angle going on here. Randstad bought Monster. They’re Dutch. And they have an investment wing, that, well, invests in a bunch of cool companies. (If you’ve read this far, and put up with the gifs nonsense, I’m betting you’ve heard of a few of them). Textkernel is based in Amsterdam. (I love me some Amsterdam, too). The suitor for CareerBuilder is… yup: an investment firm.

Hmm.

Here’s how I see it playing out: CareerBuilder & Monster have some value. In parts of their business. They’ve got a bunch of junk, too. They’ve been acquired by people who are good at separating wheat and chaff (and, yeah: lots of chaff to sift through). Once they’ve figured out what’s the what, I don’t think we’re going to see either brand left standing. If I’m Randstad, I’m integrating the good bits into my other investment companies. Maybe scaling Monster down to a slim PPC resource. Getting rid of the excess. If I’m buying CareerBuilder, I’m getting my hands on Textkernel, combining it with workforce analytics, and using what good is left in their data set to build tools that power companies like Airbnb, PwC, Uber, the Washington Post (amongst many others) that are looking for ways to take advantage of workers in the gig economy. Because there’s gold there.

But… yeah. Cede the ground to Indeed. And stop trying to sell me an ATS… sexy as that may be.

Also this gif is completely gratuitous. Because you put up with reading this ramble.

HRsmart Customers Just Took Another Hit

Follow the bouncing ball. In 2005, Monster agrees to be a reseller for an ATS called HRsmart. Over time, as the market shifts and other tools (Indeed, LinkedIn) outmaneuver Monster, it decides to roll itself out as a product company that also happened to have a deep candidate database, and a job board. They bought several companies, and began offering career site hosting, nominal job distribution, etc. They kept HRsmart at part of that offering, but did not acquire the technology

*(As an aside, the ATS is a super important tool to not control it as part of your tech-offering stack, if you’re offering a full stack solution for sale…)

Monster sells its solution to a number of companies.

In 2015, HRsmart is acquired by Deltek, a poor-man’s, wanna be Oracle.

You remember them, from the movies, right..?

They decide that since Oracle has an ATS, they need one too. Support and development at HRsmart stops almost immediately. ATS begins to go down for clients, sometimes for days on end.

In 2016, Monster is acquired by Randstad, which has its own set of tools, as well as investments in numerous recruiting tech start-ups. Including some which could compete with Monster’s tech stack – so, is the tech at Monster being sunsetted, merged, or what..?

This week, HRsmart drops the ball with at least a dozen clients. Jobs do not post, and applying is turned off, as they announce that Deltek is being acquired by Roper Technologies. And if you use HRsmart, and think things were bad under Deltek? Just you wait. This ride’s gonna get all sorts of bumpy for you.

Here’s the thing – this is where it helps to be able to “dial a friend”. If any company that bought HRsmart over the past few years had asked for our advisement, they would not be in the boat they’re in now.

It’s that simple. HireClix Consulting Services (we’re calling it “Sherpa”) is designed to help avoid just these types of problems. We have spent years getting to know the technology in our space – who’s doing what, where, what’s the innovation, what’s breaking, who integrates with who & how, who simply cannot be implemented, and on and on. Our depths and breadth of knowledge in talent acquisition technology comes from years of working within the space. We install, rip out, reinstall, fine tune, etc, ATSs, live within their CRM, marketing platforms, sourcing tools. Manage our clients’ tool selection processes.  Partner with the investment space, providing guidance to HC tech investors. Test products and help with design for vendors.

And, because of all of that – we don’t build products. Not ever. Any consulting firm that tries to offer advice on what tool to buy, when they build a tool like that… is pretty suspect. Our guidance is agnostic – client driven, and knowledge informed. We can get you to the top of your next mountain.

Meantime, if you’re reading this, and you’re using Monster’s technology, call us. Asap. It’s free – we’d like to help, since the site dropping, and acquisition, cannot be fun to be dealing with. Just email martin.burns@hireclix.com, or call: 617-851-7277.

Monster, Randstad, and… What’s That About HRSmart?

It’s entirely possible you heard the news. Possible. Certainly, if you work in the recruiting industry, it’s definitely possible. Maybe even highly so.

Anyways: Randstad (big giant Dutch recruitment process outsourcing company) bought (former) big giant US job board company Monster.

Which is interesting.

This acquisition may benefit Randstad – the integrations are going to be fascinating – and there’s nothing wrong with that. If they really keep the Monster brand intact, it’s going to be tough long-term (and I don’t see them doing that). So, if it’s not to create an entire separate product company, and it’s me at Randstad, I’m doing this for a simple reason.

Growth, through (a modest) diversification.

The RPOs have had several years of growth in the EU and Asia-Pac, but were more stagnant in the States and Latin America. They’ll likely slow in the EU (political and economic instability may hinder job growth), but continue to scale in Asia-Pac, as hiring by scale vs quality is still more the need for many of the larger manufacturers. The larger RPOs have been retooling internal processes lately, seeking innovations in models, technology, offerings, etc. On the technology side alone, many, if not all, of them are dealing with legacy contracts from clients, have to work with disparate ATS’s due to their client base, often don’t do CRM internally, etc. Because of this, they don’t have the ability to get a strong handle on source tracking, SEO, etc etc, because their data is in multiple places.

Ranstad’s move makes sense, in this context. If they want to rip out a number of internal, hodgepodge systems, and replace them with something new, unified, and efficient (not to mention being able to provide this suite, at a cost, as a service to clients), then they have two options: build from the ground up, or buy an existing stack and adapt it.

My money’s on the latter. To buttress, consider this: the Ranstad Investment Fund that invest only in TA/ recruitment start-ups. Some of them, you know. They also have a really smart team.

Here’s why I think it adds up. First, Randstad is buying a stack that has some tested technology across most of the recruitment cycle. I say most of, for a reason. There are a couple important gaps.

Roughly, define the recruitment process as starting with “we need to hire someone” to end with “they started”. It’s everything in that gap. Monster’s tools hit at pieces of that process (sometimes over and over) – they’ve got workforce planning tools to get the job opened, advertising and research tools to find people, a CRM to keep track of leads, a career site hosting product for you, and an applicant tracking system (ATS) so you can track people as they apply and move through your process. The issue is… not all of it works well, or necessarily together. There are still issues with integration across the tools. The CRM is a challenge, to say the least. And – strangely – the ATS and career site hosting offerings aren’t even Monster-owned products.

That’s right: two of, one could easily argue, the most important parts of the overall hiring process, are not Monster. They’re HRSmart, owned by  . HRSmart no longer works very well (source tracking is minimal-to-nothing, career site occasionally goes offline for hours – sometimes an entire day, etc). We’ve been urging Monster to work on the issues, but… well, not their product. And the products owners are Deltek, which is simply a private equity backed acquisition play that is not investing in development. So they’re not gonna fix it.

I see a possible future. If Randstad completes their acquisition, they’ll have some holes to fill in the offering stack. Notably, ATS and career site. Randstad invests in recruitment technology, and there’s an opinion out there that it’s simply as a way to test and potentially acquire technology firms. One of their investments is a platform called gr8people: a career-site product, ats, and CRM all in one.

Again, if I’m doing strategy at Randstad, I’m sliding those products into the stack, and shoving HRSmart out. Heck, I’m looking at my entire portfolio, and saying “can we really step up, and offer a working ERP that focuses purely on TA? It makes sense, right? You get your own internal ERP running, since it can track the vast majority of your product cycle; can offer a full stack to your clients; and get all that anonymized data in one spot, finally, where you can begin to build data models.

Here’s the rub for you, the HRSmart user: this doesn’t happen tomorrow. You’re still stuck with a platform that’s frustrating, and not going to get any better due to the integration. You may get access to the Randstad stack at some point, but it’s going to come with costs (higher fees, unlikely you’ll be able to just buy career site hosting & ATS, pressure to go RPO).

If it’s me, and now I’m just me, the guy who used to run Talent Acquisition at a few places, and thinks about this stuff way too much, I’m going to want to hear about options if I’m an HRSmart customer. Heck, I may just want to hear about options because I don’t like my current platform. If only for safety, to make sure what I’m doing makes sense (there are a loooot of options out there right now).

Can I Help?

Since I’ve been there, and feel your pain, I’d love to make an offer (paying it forward, since I’ve been given similar help in my time).

Call me. Well, or e-mail me for times, and we’ll set something up. A half-hour chat, about where you’re at, and what are your options. I’ll pontificate, probably, but mostly there will be good advice, and probably some laughs. A shared war story. Or two.

Here’s the info:
Phone: 617-488-9444
E-mail: martin@hireclix.com