Jobs today with StepStone - 12/2000

StepStone has announced an undertaking to purchase 75% of the voting rights in Job-Today, Germanyís third largest online recruitment company.

Job-Today specialises in job offerings from the IT sector. It has excellent relationships and co-operation agreements with leading German IT magazine publishers, particularly with the Konradin Verlag. Konradin Verlag will remain a shareholder in StepStone. It also has an excellent regional presence, being particularly strong in Berlin in co-operation with the print and online media of Gruner & Jahr in Berlin (BerlinOnline, Berliner Zeitung). Job-Today also has a strong customer base acting for many well-known German and multinational companies such as Mummert & Partner, GFT Technologies, SAP, Mannesmann, Brokat, Deutsche Postbank and E-Plus.

In October 1999 Job-Today acquired SwissWebJobs Gmbh, an online recruitment agency in Switzerland. In February 2000, Job-Today entered into a merger agreement with Job-Index, a Swiss HR publisher who owns the online recruitment site Jobs.ch. The combined businesses are believed to be the largest online recruiter in Switzerland.

In the first half of 2000, Job-Today had sales of EUR 3.6 million which was up 220% on the comparable period of the previous year. As at June 30th 2000, there were 26,604 CVs in the company's database, the Job-Today sites had 9237 vacancies and the company had 96 employees in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Giles Clarke, chief executive of StepStone, said The acquisition of Job-Today represents a unique opportunity to catapult StepStone into a leading position in the fast growing and important German market. There is little overlap between Job-Today and StepStone's German subsidiary, and the prospects for the combined businesses are exciting in that it will allow us to create a specific StepStone IT portal within our overall product offering. The IT skills shortage in Europe is one reason why we have already opened StepStone India to help meet our customers' recruitment needs in this area. We will build on and develop even further the strengths that Job-Today brings in this specialist IT recruitment arena. In addition, Job-Today's operations in Switzerland are a considerable benefit since StepStone is not currently represented in that country.