This time Stepstone buy into France

The French job board market seems to be seeing a lot of activity of late. Recently I talked about CareerBuilders entry into the market by purchasing LesJeudis but this time StepStone is taking over the French LVE Group, check out more here.

So now I make it Monster, CareerBuilder, StepStone, Adenclassifieds and Régionsjob in France. Is there room for any more.. definitnely, expect more aquisitions and more consolidation to come.

Zubed - GeoSpatial Jobs are here: This rocks!

This is super cool!
And, super clever!

I was waiting for Google to bring out this system as a marriage between Google Base Jobs and Google Maps but it looks like they didn't think about it, didn't see it as being a big enough priority or were simply bet to the post by Zubed.

Zubed is an online mapping system that matches employers with job seekers for permanent and contract jobs for free, for both parties. However, recruitment agencies can not use the system and are politely asked to stay away!It has a simple messaging system in place, allows advanced search and has some networking functionality set up.

Career Builder enters the French Market with a Bang!

Also worth taking note of is Career Builder's recent announcement that it is entering into the French market with the purchase of the LesJeudis group which includes a prestigious IT job board and also ingenieur-emplois.com, Erecrut, Phonemploi, RecruLex and CAOemplois. The group also has their fingers further in the employment pie in France with such portfolio prducts as: proposes candidate management solutions via Profilsoft employment faris and job search engines. It looks like CareerBuilders expansion outside the US is picking up some series velocity to challenge Monster's hegemony and the strong growth of Total Jobs on a global context.

Here's what Yasin Farhan, President of the International Careerbuilder Group said o the employees of the newly acquired company via email.

I am excited to announce that CareerBuilder is continuing its international expansion with the acquisition of Lesjeudis.com, the leading independent online job site in France. Lesjeudis operates six different recruitment Web sites in France focused on various employment segments and is one of the most widely recognized IT job sites in France. The company is also a leader in job fairs in France. The Lesjeudis brand, coupled with MSN’s enormous internet penetration in France (more than 20 million visitors in May to MSN sites in France), positions CareerBuilder for long term success in the French marketplace.

As a leading economy in Europe, France will play a key role in CareerBuilder’s international expansion. This acquisition adds hundreds of thousands of new job seekers and many of France’s leading employers to CareerBuilder’s international network.

I would like to welcome Cedric Barbier, the founder of Lesjeudis and his team to CareerBuilder. Cedric has built a great organization, consistent with CareerBuilder’s culture and values, and we are thrilled he chose CareerBuilder as the home for his organization. Lesjeudis will retain the well-recognized brand that Cedric and his team have built over the last 10 years and Cedric will continue to lead the company.

This acquisition, combined with our recent launches in Italy, Belgium, Norway and Romania, are significant steps towards achieving our mission of being the global leader in online recruitment.

Read more here: 1, 2, .

LinkedIn to go IP0 in 2009.

Who said there wasn't money to be made in Social Networks, read here, and here. With the company projected to make 100m US dollars in revenue this year they've come a long way. Despite having many exit opportunities from a large number of suiters...of which I would imagine Monster was one... it will be interesting to see if LinkedIn opens its platform to developers and how if it does so it will change their offerings to the now 23 million people with profiles on the site.

The new public profile url builder in LinkedIn and cool new French Recruitment Software

I just changed my public profile URL in LinkedIn to: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irishjobs - you can see that i now have the words Irish and Jobs in the profile. This is pretty neat as you can take high real estate words on the web and apply them to a web address on your profile which will increase the chances of organic search queries by the public driving eye balls to your LinkedIn profile where you can be advertising your current open reqs!

Also, the French jobs search engine Moovement has recently launched the software Job Board which allows a company create its own HR and recruitment site for a small monthly fee.

Announcement: New Job!

I'm glad to report that I have got a little promotion in Microsoft and now I am a global sourcing manager working on some interesting new challenges we have in supporting the business to make the move to a more distributive development strategy. In doing so I will be spreading the net to learn more about our strategic development centres and hot r-e-g-o-s which is where we think we should be sourcing talent from. This will be more travel, which I sincerely hope won't be too much, as I don't like missing my runs in Phoenix Park in the heart of Dublin or my weekly game of football with the lads, but, it will give me a change to learn more about global sourcing which I am delighted about. Top on my list of things I'm going to try learn are:

-How to write search strings on Google, Live and Baidu in Cantonese and Mandrin
-What are the top technical recruitment agencies to use in Israel and perfect writing Hebrew strings from right to left
-How to run sourcing blitzes in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad in India
-How to run competitive research programs in Scandanavian

Amazing the journey's one can go on from a little room in Ireland. Should be fun!