What Does CareerBuilder’s Acquisition of Broadbean Mean?

CareerBuilder announced the acquisition of Broadbean from Daily Mail and General Trust plc for an undisclosed sum at 7 pm PST April 1. This is another big move for a recruitment industry in favor of an integrated hiring platform, where talent sourcing and candidate management are in one place.

ERE.net’s Todd Raphael briefly summarized the acquisition as “part of CareerBuilder’s goal of moving from a job board to a more sweeping software provider.”

Broadbean essentially offered 1-click job posting for customers who use old school applicant tracking systems that lack this capability. While this solves the job distribution problem, in my opinion it was still not possible for their customers to have an end-to-end view of their talent pipeline. Broadbean reported on clicks, but then only the ATS would know (supposedly) who actually got hired. A full picture of sourcing analytics – all the way through the hire – is the key to optimizing your entire recruitment marketing budget.

Broadbean, which posted jobs to more than 6,000 job boards, has historical data on the job posting performance for many CareerBuilder competitors, such as Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn.

“Gaining access to such business intelligence as the relative performance of competitors may not have been the single driver behind the deal,” reported John Zappe on the FordyceLetter. “But it certainly adds to the “Big Data” warehouse CareerBuilder is building.”

In terms of accumulating data on the labor market, this builds on CareerBuilder’s Sept. 11, 2012 acquisition of Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., an economic software firm that specialized in employment data, and is in line with their previously stated long-term vision to measure the supply and demand of labor.

What does this acquisition mean for the future of job boards posting their customers’ open jobs to other job boards?

Most immediately, Broadbean said it “will continue to operate independently and work closely with job boards, Applicant Tracking Systems, and Recruitment CRMs. As always, our products will be built with these partners in mind to ensure tight integrations and the greatest ROI. More information will be shared as our companies come together.”

“Excited to expand our portfolio and continue the rapid growth of our global HR SaaS operation,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder.

StaffingIndustry.com Director Hugo Traeger tweeted his congratulations to Kelly Robinson, CEO of Broadbean. Robinson responded, “Thank you, very happy……”

Clearly the future of recruiting technology will be one platform for all of hiring. It seems, that is what CareerBuildder is trying to build. But can you be a vendor and a marketplace at the same time? How will their competitors react?

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