The US’s largest online recruitment portal CareerBuilder.com has announced that Microsoft has bought a 4pc equity stake in its site. It has not revealed how much Microsoft is paying for this.
In a separate deal, MSN has renewed its alliance with CareerBuilder for the company to supply exclusive content to the MSN Careers channel in the US until 2013.
This renewed deal has also made provisions for CareerBuilder to expand overseas through working with MSN to provide jobs content for key MSN sites internationally.
“Taking an equity stake in the most prominent job site in the US presents a unique opportunity to enhance our business relationship,” said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice-president and chief media officer for MSN at Microsoft.
“In addition, the agreement to share our global footprint with CareerBuilder unites our worldwide technology and information channels and gives users access to unmatched job search and job distribution resources.”
CareerBuilder has been the exclusive jobs search engine for MSN Careers since 2004, raising its monthly site traffic by almost 10 million visitors from 2003 to 2004.
The new agreement, which runs to 2013, means that CareerBuilder will pay MSN up to US$443m to remain the sole jobs content provider.
CareerBuilder has already begun to raise its international profile by launching sites in the UK, Canada and India last year, as well as acquiring two separate online job sites in the Netherlands and Sweden last month.
Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, said that the new deals with Microsoft and MSN “enables CareerBuilder to continue to grow faster in the US than any other job site while leveraging a strong international platform to quickly enter new markets in Europe and all over the world”.
Although CareerBuilder has a UK presence there is, as of yet, no site targeted at the Irish market.
By Marie Boran
