Dotcom jobs site relaunches

Jobfinder.ie, one of Ireland's few dotcom successes, has been relaunched by key members of its original management team.

The recruitment website, which in April 2000 was sold to Norwegian group StepStone for £7.9 million in cash and shares, was a pioneer of online recruitment in Ireland.

Developed at considerable cost by technology publisher Scope Communications, Jobfinder employed 13 people, had annual revenues of £1.1 million and was the leading Irish recruitment site when it was acquired.

A publicly traded dotcom darling, StepStone ran into trouble after aggressively rolling out across Europe, and subsequently the Jobfinder.ie domain passed through a number of owners in the early years of this decade.

Last year, the domain registration lapsed and was snapped up by Paul Healy and Gerard Kennedy, respectively the managing director and operations director of Small Planet, the company that originally traded as Jobfinder.

This time around, the Jobfinder model is totally different. Mr Healy describes it as a "boutique or niche" recruitment service. Using an off-the-shelf Google Search Appliance (basically Google's search technology pre-installed on a server) every night Jobfinder indexes the pages of recruitment agencies that it has signed up. When job hunters carry out a search on the Jobfinder site the results are links to relevant pages on recruitment agency sites.

"Online recruitment is now a very mature market, so the wisdom was we couldn't break in again," says Mr Healy. "We knew we couldn't do another 'me too' recruitment database either."

Jobfinder has about 14 agencies live on its service with a target of 30 by January next. It is purposely targeting the small to medium firms who find it harder to gain exposure on the top ranked sites such as IrishJobs and Recruit Ireland. So competitive has that space become that there are now firms specialising in daily re-posting vacancies for agencies to ensure they rank highly in searches.

Mr Healy says Jobfinder is paid to index its clients' sites and charges based on the number of vacancies they list. To fulfil its end of the bargain, Jobfinder needs to deliver job seekers and as a result, Mr Healy says it will be engaging in high-profile marketing and advertising activities.