The "Social Job Search Engine" Jobster was acquired this week according to an article on TechCrunch. Jobster was recently a division of Recruiting.com - the company which was formed out of the dust that settled when Jobster quickly rose and fell in the job search engine niche.
A "Social Job Search Engine" ?
That's what Jobster billed itself as. Did they achieve that?
(After all my time working in the job search/employment sector of Internet marketing, I still don't know what "social job search engine" means, do you?
Jobster Recently
Jobster.com was recently just a simple job search site that was backfilled through the Indeed publisher platform. Jobs weren't very unique, and any volume of job seeker traffic that Jobster had plummetted from previous highs of several million unique visitors per month down to just 260k visitors in February 2010 according to Compete.com.
The Jobster legacy
Jobster was best known for the spark it provided to the industry via it's disruptive yet controversial CEO Jason Goldberg. While successfully raising $60 million in venture capital for the business, Goldberg also acchieved some notoriety for the business by publicly calling out the employment sector leader Monster.com for it's faults during this period.
Specifically, Goldberg created memorable content on Jobster's behalf by publicly stating that Monster is a "crap product" - the video is still available on YouTube and has been viewed thousands of times to date.
To Goldberg's credit, Monster eventually modified it's site design and removed many of the profitable yet harmful practices it was participating in which hurt their user's experience of the Monster site.
Here is the video of Golberg's statement claiming that Monster is "crap" :
Jobster's future?
It is yet to be known what will become of the Jobster site, so my statements regarding it's demise may be premature, but given the recent trajectory of losing job seeker traffic and being acquired by an unknown company do not bode well for a revival of the site as a viable competitor to the leading job search engines.
Who is Zapoint?
The company is based in Brookline, MA. Their current website showcases experience in career management, talent management and employee engagement. To me, I'm still unclear on how to define their business, so please judge them for yourself: www.zapoint.com and feel free to enlighten me in the comment section below.
The future for Recruiting.com
All this leads to the question of what will happen next for Recruiting.com - it's easy to assume that Recruiting.com divested itself of the Jobster site in order to concentrate on its primary business, but what business is that? Are they still a viable company? Recruiting.com bills itself as a B2B "Prospect Relationship Management" business. Here is another category where I can use your help: What does that mean?
We wish good luck to all the former Jobster employees. There was a time when they all served a unique and useful purpose in the industry. That time has passed and most are now with other companies by now. Your effort was helpful, courageous and bold. Good luck - please stay in touch!
Jobster was acquired by Zapoint (who?) thus finally ending the troubled company's struggle to gain a footing against strong competition in the job search engine market dominated by Indeed.com and SimplyHired. Or will Jobster now emerge as a new competitor via new leadership?
