TMP Worldwide, owner of Monster.com, the world's biggest online job board, is buying HotJobs.com, the world's second biggest job board for $460m in newly issued shares. This is a 21 per cent premium over HotJobs share price at close of play on June 28, 2001.

TMP's move represents a significant consolidation in the fragmented world of job boards - in the US, at any rate. Hot Jobs has ventured much less further afield than Monster, maintaining overseas sites in Australia and Canada only (hotjobs.co.uk is a graduate recruitment come-on operated by The Post Office). Monster is also in these countries.

The Monster/Hot Jobs combo has a total of more than 14 million resumes (CVs) and more than 650,000 jobs.

The consolidation fits in nicely with new economy thinking about domination of the network: job hunters, will flock to the network with the most, and best, jobs. This will generate the most response for recruitment companies and employers, which in turn will spend more money with this network, at the expense of smaller, less successful networks.

That's the theory. In practice, the online recruitment market has an awful long way to go before we get down to even two or three networks.

In the UK alone, there are 300 job boards - maybe 90 of which tout, for instance, IT jobs. There are maybe 10-12 strong contenders - sometimes because of funding (Monster is not a big name in IT recruitment in the UK, for example). The market leader, Jobserve.co.uk, has maybe 60 per cent of all the IT jobs on offer in the UK, and generates 60 per cent of all the turnover for IT recruitment.

New economy theory would suggest that Jobserve would increase its share of jobs; in practice, the UK recruitment agencies will have no intention of letting this happen, and rivals will slowly chip away at market share. ®