PowerOne Media, once a major vendor for small and medium-sized newspapers, has sold off its recruitment site, CareerSite to three of its newspaper owners: Media News Group, Hearst and Lee Enterprises. The companies are expected to shut CareerSite down after an 18 month transition period, per rumor (see comment below) and try to convert its remaining affiliates to the new newspaper alliance with HotJobs. The news was first reported by Paid Content.
CareerSite’s sale leaves CarCast as PowerOne Media’s last major property. In February, the company sold off its Zwire portal, national advertising, AdQuest and Yellow Pages units to TownNews, a vendor network largely controlled by Lee.
CareerSite hasn’t kept pace with recruitment trends, and its sale doesn’t come as a surprise. The Ann Arbor-based company has been laying off its staff for months. Most of its affiliates will now likely switch up to HotJobs (or other vendors outside the consortium). By doing so, they’ll begin to finally focus less on job listings, which have been newspapers’ traditional bread and butter, and more on where the action is in recruitment: “Indeed” style meta search, and direct recruitment solutions to employers.
What is sad is how PowerOne and its constituent newspapers had the hubris to believe that they knew better about how to structure and integrate the recruitment application than those that had been on the leading edge of the technology while the PowerOne constituents were poo pooing the whole Internet “thing”. The result of this being that CareerSite has been mismanaged, initially by the MNG Interactive people and then more aggressively by the POM people.
The surprising thing is that CareerSite has survived this long, the product being basically unchanged for over three years. But everything you attribute to a recruitment application was initially developed by CareerSite. It is sad to see it pass.
Note: Owen Medd was a cofounder of CareerSite and had served as CTO/System architect.
The rumor is that CareerSite will continue to run for 18 months, ostensibly to give the current customers time to unwind out of CareerSite and transition to HotJobs.
The PowerOne management has, in my somewhat biased opinion, pretty much gutted the ability of CareerSite to make any significant progress advancing the product the last three and a half years. Initially they tried to use the CareerSite technology base to advance their own C2 platform attempting to rectify it’s significant technology issues (cost and poor implementation decisions). Subsequently they froze any technology development or maintenance as they tried to get a handle taking over the CareerSite technology. The final death knell was when they elected to outsource a rewrite of the CareerSite platform to India without much understanding of the feature set and with no input from the system architect (that would be me… myself and Ed Farrell conceived CareerSite as I was exiting from the original Online Career Center prior to it’s purchase by Monster). This failed and the end result was the release of a skunk works internal project to address performance issues. I’m not sure how widely that was deployed to customers though.
CareerSite was pretty much doomed when Advance left, as Advance is very much a technology/platform buyer. Advance leaving meant that they didn’t see a future in the platform and that they were better served dumping their rather large investment (millions of dollars) in CareerSite and moving to a completely new vendor.
Owen’s facts on PowerOne Media aren’t 100% accurate.
But the bottom line is that PowerOne Media’s investors were never really ready to embrace the commitment and investments needed to build a national brand. And they were never strong enough to mange their local newspapers. PowerOne Media was caught in the middle of this struggle. Perhaps Yahoo/HotJobs, with its stronger brand and deeper pockets will have a better chance at success.
As someone that has been involved well beyond Owen and Isaac’s involvement, I have a few clarifications/comments.
There have been no layoffs for months, we (CareerSite) have actually grown and hired in several functional areas as we have continue to mature. Any layoffs or reductions have been with the POM corporate structure as products have been sold. CareerSite has grown and became the center of Enterprise infrastructure and development for the three remaining products.
Owen’s characterization of the current technology platform is somewhat inaccurate. While it is true that there was an attempt to outsource a rewrite to India by individuals that did not have any concept of what they were doing, the actual rewrite was completed in house and all of the customers completed migration earlier this year. The current technology platform is extensible, scalable, suitable, etc. The ‘legacy’ platform had become a little long in the tooth given its late 97 birth and lack of qualified oversight at the code level. The real problem has been a complete lack of strategic direction from the investors to define, fund, and build a product and brand as Isaac stated.
In terms of Advance, I would agree that their expectations based on the unrealistic promises of when the platform would be ready combined with the fact that it was status quo in terms of feature/function were the nail in the coffin.
The last year has resulted in completion of several internally initiated significant feature/function improvements for candidates, employers, and newspapers with several others ongoing at the point of the plug pulling. It was obviously too little, too late.
It is a sad event given that CareerSite has always had talented people wanting to make a difference but lacked investors with a strategic plan beyond acting as a low cost ASP that would answer to whichever schizophrenic newspaper group was currently screaming the loudest.
The author’s name is a pseudonym.
POM is and always has been a victim of it’s own gross mismanagement.
Coming soon to a tombstone near you:
Here Lies Another Faceless, Forgotten Dotcom
It’s hard to stay current with trends in any industry these days, but POM didn’t seem to know what horse it was on or how to ride it. That and the drearily common types of jackass hires for upper management - people more concerned with textbook management theory and ‘comtrol’, than with facing up to their own inexperience or lack of ability - seem to have sufficed for the K.O.
c’est la morte. Y’all will get better work somewhere else.
CareerSite is an interesting case study in terms of the politics and spin of corporate mergers. Certainly at this point the goal of all concerned is to put the proper spin on their involvement and move on to, hopefully, bigger and better things.
Information flow, the control of it, and the ability of a group to adequately analyze that information play an important role in any group’s perception of a set of events. CareerSite has had quite a number of groups involved, it has always been humorous to see what each of those groups is fed about a particular event and how they react.
I was just reading how the popular axiom “the winners write history” is slowly fading away as those who witnessed events first hand can easily share their viewpoints.
Local content, indeed.
PowerOne Media’s CareerSite, like most legacy job boards, relegated itself to a state of irrelevance by neglecting to satisfy and engage its users. Show me a job board (or search engine) that fails to deliver exceedingly relevant job search results, and I’ll show you a job board that will never reach its intented potential.
Yes, the Yahoo! (HotJobs) partnership will generate revenue for all stakeholders.
I think it is still to be seen whether yet another legacy job board (Yahoo! HotJobs) will produce revenue for the new set of stakeholders. After all, what is new or different about the HotJobs platform? Or Monster? Or CareerBuilder?
The primary differentiator is not whether a recruitment solution is “legacy” or not (witness Monster, HotJobs, et al, all of which are spawned from the Online Career Center/CareerSite “legacy”) but what sales and distribution organization is promoting the solution and how much content and and eyeballs they can gather. Who would have guessed in 1997 (hmmm… well, pre-TMP buyout) that Monster would be in the position it is in. Or that CareerBuilder would actually have survived to be where it is today? A well-organized sales/marketing/business organization with a crappy solution trumps a superior technical solution with lousy sales and marketing every time.
I meant to mention that it is my belief that a reasonable recruitment solution, with all the web 2.0 bells and whistles, integrated into the existing distribution networks and doing a reasonably good job of tracking where individual responses come from (and ignoring the myth of “relevant” job searches, as none of the existing job boards do a good job of producing relevant searches) is relatively straightforward to produce.
Properly targeting and promoting such a solution is the tricky part. Can you target a market segment that gets you critical mass on a local level and allows you to leverage that into a larger network play? Inquiring minds (and wallets…) want to know.
Relevancy requires engagement on behalf of both the employer and candidate to produce the necessary data points. Short of writing the killer app to read the employers mind based on a usually poorly written job posting or chaining them to their chairs to fill out a RedMatch style 10,000 question form, it usually degrades to keywords, occupations, and location. Particularly when newspaper ads are involved.
Clearly almost anyone can write a job board given that there are now over 40,000 of them out there. The lure of $400 job postings, $1000 resume searches, and tens of thousands of dollars in Google Adsense has created a porn site like frenzy to find a way to cash in before employers stopping wasting their money on the advertising PPC model and start paying for results. While distribution can be considered free given the Craigslist’s and Google’s of the world, effective distribution to engage a targeted set of eyeballs is not. Particularly when the passive job seeker is taken into account. Who wants to hire the people that are always looking for a job? The eyeballs you really want probably aren’t actively searching the job boards - local, national or otherwise. Social networking (SimplyHired, Jobster), resume mining combined with career progression prediction, targeted advertising placement (Dice), etc are all being tried. I agree with Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg, in that the solution that gets HR to stop sorting resumes and start recruiting again will win.
Of course I am over simplifying and the argument could be made that for a significant percentage of job postings (especially newspaper listings), it is only about getting the position in front of as many people that are looking as possible. Something has to explain why the local oil change place paid a significant chunk of change for ‘priority placement’ on the local job board, mlive.com/jobs.
Finally, it has been interesting to see the latest commentary on CareerSite being broken, an anchor, etc but not one finger being pointed at the MNG, Hearst, and Advances for running into the ground through mismanagement. Despite it all, the product was profitable and continually signing new business. (Despite) CareerSite’s lackluster marketing/sales effort - it was obviously a viable product for providing private label recruitment sites. It would not require a ton of investment to effectively own that space with a superior product that delivers results.
CareerSite marketing and sales has always sucked, it has never been the strong point at any stage of the organization. Despite the fact that product development has languished, the basic software premise continues to be viable and salable.
Passive job seeker, stop HR from sorting resumes… It is kind of spooky to see 1994 business plan common sense being sucessfully recirculated. Good to see it all coming back to light again.
Given that the CareerSite software experience has not been dispersed widely beyond Ann Arbor, I suspect we will see an equivalent software platform emerge for those customers that value a networked, brandable recruitment solution.
After all, why not 40,001 sites?
At least those poor souls at POM won’t have to deal with the cheap nickle and dime jack-asses in the newspaper industry. One of the biggest reasons POM was not profitable was the fact that they did everything for free. If a newspaper cried a little bit then POM would create whatever enhancement they wanted, free of charge. That is a dictionary-perfect example of how not to run a successful business.