No terms were announced. The Toronto Star, owned by Torstar, one of the two 50 percent owners of Workopolis, did not post anything about the sale immediately on TheStar.ca, the newspaper’s website.
Workopolis will make major operational changes. On its home page, Workopolis said all resumes in its database will only be available for one more week, and that it will be operated by Indeed as part of the Indeed publisher network.
“If you have set up a job alert, you will continue to receive that job alert from Workopolis.com, as you requested,” the home-page alert said. “If you have a resume on file on Workopolis.com, you will have until April 11, 2018 to download and save your resume, as your resume will be unavailable on Workopolis.com after the purchase is completed.”
Workopolis dominated recruitment advertising in Canada for more than a decade.
Home-page notice on Workopolis
It was born out of a decision by The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star — aggressive competitors in print — to merge their job listings, because the listings from each were more complementary than competitive. It launched in 2000 as a partnership between the two companies. In 2002, Gesca Limitée became a third partner in the site. In 2006, Torstar and Gesca, which publishes La Presse in Montreal and Le Soleil in Quebec City, bought out Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc., the parent of the Globe and Mail, and each took a 50 percent stake. (Technically, the Gesca stake was held by Square Victoria Digital Properties, a subsidiary of Gesca.)
Workopolis has operated independently of the newspapers. It’s headquartered in downtown Toronto, with offices in eight cities in Canada, and offers services in English and French.
In the news release announcing the sale, Recruit said it is expected to close by the end of the month.
“Workopolis is a trusted brand and leading Canadian job site for both job seekers and employers,” Hisayuki Idekoba (known as “Deko”), COO of Recruit and CEO of Indeed, said in the release. “With millions of loyal users that rely on the site, this acquisition allows us to expand our commitment to providing Canadian job seekers with a superior job search experience.”
Tokyo-based Recruit Holdings (Tokyo: 6098) has been operating since 1960. It bought Indeed in 2012. It owns at least 18 recruitment, auto and real estate sites, and dozens of staffing companies worldwide. Its 2018 revenue goal for Indeed is $2 billion globally — triple the $683 million that Indeed generated in 2015, just three years earlier. In August, Indeed bought Interviewed, owner of human resource software built around assessments.
Workopolis had 2.8 million visits in April 2017, based on SimilarWeb data, ahead of Monster.ca at 2.4 million. (We didn’t carry data on the traffic to Indeed.ca.) Other Canadian recruitment sites include Eluta.ca, Glassdoor.ca and Kijiji.ca, the horizontal site owned by EBay.
Here’s what we said about Workopolis in our 2016 Recruitment Advertising Annual: “Workopolis is Canada’s recruitment classified leader both in terms of traffic and listings (30,000 to 50,000 jobs posted at any one time). Half of its traffic comes from mobile. It has a database of 9 million resumes. … Ten million ‘career alerts’ are sent by email per month. Pricing ranges from $600 to $725 per job. In 2015, Workopolis jumped into programmatic advertising with Applify, a new pay-per-applicant product, which delivers job listings across other Canadian job boards and aggregators, as well as the Workopolis site. Employers set their top price, Workopolis does the rest. Includes an analytics dashboard. In 2015, Workopolis introduced “Scout” which bundles job postings with a dedicated Workopolis recruiter.”
