Irish publications group, Scope Communications, has finalised a deal to manage the online recruitment services of the world's largest IT publisher, International Data Group (IDG).
Through a website hosted in Dublin, IDG plans to build the most comprehensive "portal" site for IT jobs. It will take its material from the recruitment sections of all IDG's media organisations located in 75 countries worldwide, and make them centrally available to jobseekers. IDG had revenues of $2.05 billion in 1997 and employs more than 9,000 people worldwide.
The new website, called JobUniverse, will start a trial service in two weeks time carrying recruitment sites for one of IDG's principal US weekly magazines and IDG's operation in the Netherlands. It will also integrate data from Scope Communications' own IT recruitment site, JobFinder in Ireland, and from IDG Denmark. Early 1999 will see a further rollout into Europe and worldwide.
Any jobseeker visiting JobUniverse will be able to search for a job in all IDG's recruitment sites worldwide, and receive search results in their own language. The candidate can apply there and then through the website. JobUniverse will also provide a bureau service for new countries to develop their IT recruitment sites, which will be hosted via virtual servers in Dublin, storing a massive bank of shared database information.
The new service is based on a system developed on an Informix platform in Dublin, by an eight-month-old start-up company, Technology Software Services. Each recruitment site will be locally managed but by consolidating all the information into one portal site, jobseekers are guaranteed extensive translated data from each country.
Scope Communications publisher, Mr Frank Quinn, said that recruitment on the Web was one of the fastest-growing online services. "It is a fact that the large players are all based in the US, for example Monster Board, Career Mosaic, and HotJobs. JobUniverse, because it's based in Europe, has a unique head start, because IDG is not only a market leader in the US, it also has IT media businesses in every corner of Europe."
This development ensures Jobfinder, which is currently hosted through Infolive, will become part of a new site which will be aggressively branded worldwide. Since it was established in November 1996, it has generated its revenues from recruitment agency and company advertising, while the service remains free to the jobseeker.
Online recruitment is emerging as one of the fastest growth sectors on the Internet, with a recent survey of 600 companies in North America finding that one in every five companies uses the Internet to recruit staff.
The latest recruitment site to establish here, Taps.ie, has enjoyed considerable success since it launched in early October. To date around 100,000 individual visitors have used the site.
The growth of the sector will be one of the topics addressed on next Tuesday's Tech TV programme on Network 2. The episode is the last in the current series.
