Aim Group is reporting that CareerBuilder has laid off a massive 60% of its staff. This could be the beginning of the end for a job site that is still in the top 10 in terms of traffic. According to Similarweb, CB still has about 5.5 million month visitors, a far cry from their peak numbers.
Today CareerBuilder is owned by a private equity firm named Apollo Global. They sold sold off CBs international assets recently to a Greek job marketplace company and what’s left seems to be just the U.S. division.
CareerBuilder has been on a downward spiral for many years go going through layoff after layoff and slowly withering away its brand name and market share to the likes of Indeed and Ziprecruiter.
So what is the future of CareerBuilder?
At this point there’s not much you can do to make it a growing business again and I don’t think Apollo has that in mind anyway which is why they should sell it to a bigger player.
My choice would be Ziprecruiter.
I think Zip should take a page out of Indeed’s playbook and purchase a competitor which serves 3 purposes.
- It removes a competitor from the market.
- It gives Zip an instant traffic boost.
- It helps Zip maintain a buffer from Indeed getting bigger.
The last thing the market needs is Indeed getting any larger which is why I think its a smarter buy for Ziprecruiter to make.
They can use CareerBuilder much like how Indeed backfills SimplyHired today. Indeed bought SH and simply left the site up and backfilled it with its own listings. It was one of the savviest moves ever in the world of job aggregators.
I think Zip should make a statement and do the same.
This is just a wish/prediction of course. But it would be cool if it came true.
