Jobs site expands to niche sector

ONE of Ireland’s leading online recruitment companies, IrishJobs.ie, has expanded into the niche recruitment sector with the acquisition of Dublin-based rival, Jobs.ie, for an estimated €3m.

According to IrishJobs chief executive Maria Mahon, the takeover was prompted by the new business avenues Jobs.ie would provide. The latter concentrates mainly on single-job postings, where companies can post single, one-off job positions; whereas the larger mainstream players prefer to enter into longer-term relationships with clients.

Esat Telecom founder Denis O’Brien and the company’s former Chief Operations Officer Leslie Buckley are major shareholders in IrishJobs.ie.

Ms Mahon said: “The single-job sector is a growing and significant part of the overall online recruitment business. That’s evident in the fact that Jobs.ie doubled its revenue in the last 12 months. The good thing for us is that while single-job postings are growing, it’s still a relatively new part of the business in Ireland, so we’re entering it at a good time.”

She added that the two businesses will continue to run as separate operations. Jobs.ie was acquired by the specialist recruitment company Nixers.com two years ago, whereupon Nixers re-branded under the Jobs.ie banner. The business has since grown into a general national jobs board and one of the success stories of the Irish recruitment market of the last 18 months.

Niche sites which come under the Jobs.ie umbrella include Retailjobs.ie, Legaljobs.ie and Teachingjobs.ie. The company claims that site traffic has risen eight-fold over the past year and a half, that it has 600 corporate customers and is responsible for filling an average of 1,000 positions per month.

Jobs.ie also differs to the more mainstream players in that its core focus is corporate, rather than agency, business with around 85% of its posted job offers from companies rather than recruitment agencies.

It also runs a niche site servicing Swedish-speaking workers in Ireland or considering a career here. The Jobs.se offshoot serves the Irish-based multilingual call centre and technical support offices run by the likes of IBM and Xerox.

IrishJobs has been in existence for ten years and is the market leader in the online recruitment sector here.