Daily Mail group buys Jobsite for £35m

Cross-selling

By Drew Cullen • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 12th March 2004 12:20 GMT

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The Daily Mail group (DMGT) is stumping up £35m for Jobsite, the online recruitment business. The group now has a robust vehicle to cross-sell jobs across print and online.

Based in Havant, Sussex, Jobsite has 80 employees. It claims 1.6 million unique visits a month to its various job websites. And it also has a recruitment software arm, called Conkers, which distributes a couple of million vacancies ads a year to 700-plus recruitment sites.

Jobsite will continue to run as a standalone subsidiary of Associated New Media, the Daily Mail group's online division. It is, says ANM boss Andrew Hart, a "rare gem, an online company that has been profitable for nine years, thanks to the quality and experience of the team."

Keith Potts, managing director of Jobsite, said: "By joining forces with a FTSE 100 media player we will create the market leading online recruitment company. With more and more recruiters using both print and Internet to fulfil their recruitment needs, this partnership will enable us to offer a more complete solution."

And of course, if the experience of the computing and engineering sectors are anything to go by, print-based classified job advertising could fall through the floor. DMGT is paying big bunce to get into an online recruitment market currently worth £100m a year, around seven per cent of the UK's entire recruitment advertising. Online recruitment revenues are growing at a lick - 43 per cent year on year for the first three quarters of 2003 - and are expected to grow to £200m by 2008.

The deal was brokered by Continental Capital Partners, a London-based corporate finance boutique which specialises in the staffing, travel and professional service sectors. ®