Nixers.com buys jobs.ie


18 Jun 2003

Nixers.com, the Dublin-based portal which specialises in recruiting entry-level jobseekers for full- and part-time work, has bought Jobs.ie as a going concern for an undisclosed sum.

According to co-founder Vinnie Quinn, the purchase represents a strategic move by Nixers.com to expand out of niche recruitment into more mainstream online recruitment and recruitment of senior professionals.

In buying Jobs.ie, Nixers.com will be adding about 25pc traffic to its monthly traffic figures, bringing them to over 1m page impressions per month.

According to Quinn the company will run both Nixers.com and Jobs.ie simultaneously, but the more senior jobs will appear on Jobs.ie. “Since we started, we’ve been advertising jobs for dog walkers, nannies, people who dress in chicken suits to geek writers for sites like Slate.com,” he said. “Our original batch of applicants for jobs would have been in their early 20s starting out, but many have remained loyal and as they’ve grown older and more senior our jobs emphasis has grown with them and large companies began advertising more senior jobs on the site. We don’t want to slip out of our niche and yet at the same time we want to take advantage of opportunities at the senior scale of the market and therefore our acquisition of Jobs.ie.”

Since establishing in 1999, Nixers.com has filled an estimated 5,000 vacancies for 1,000 Irish employers. The site has more than 32,000 registered jobseekers and clients include Ryanair, Dell, Irish Life and Permanent, Lexmark, Conduit Plc, Eagle Star Life and Masterchefs. The company was established by managing director Marco Herbst and co-founders Vinnie Quinn and Leigh Hamilton.

In recent weeks the company formed a partnership with The Star newspaper to publish vacancies to over 484,000 offline readers every week.

In a statement, Marco Herbst said: “We made our name specialising in junior vacancies, receptionists, call centre work, security guards and the like. We now find ourselves with a client list which would be the envy of any recruitment business, and we are moving up the value chain in terms of the types of vacancies we fill on behalf of our clients.”

By John Kennedy