Classified Intelligence is estimating the RegionalHelpWanted acquisition at $100 million. My guess? Cut the purchase price and revenue estimates in half. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the deal because even if you cut these numbers in half they would still be impressive… but I can just imagine how these numbers were ‘calculated’. This is just idle speculation on my part, but consider that even when journalists conduct interviews, how inaccurate the stories turn out. Imagine trying to figure out how much a job board is really selling without guidance from the company. I’d love to be wrong about it so please email me if you know better!
OnTargetJobs is becoming a real force and HelpWanted appears to be a great business. Years ago, HelpWanted looked very unlikely to succeed when their website was nearly unusable. But RWH transformed itself. It’s a great example of a company that sold first and built later demonstrating the incredible potential we have on the Internet to become what we say we are, lol. But that was eons ago and today, this looks like a great move for OnTarget to go regional. I wonder why Jobing.com didn’t buy it… seems to me that it would have been a nice fit.
Another thing to learn from HelpWanted is that media partnerships can work. I looked at their partnership marketing with envy over the years. We invested blood sweat and tears in our partnership program but never with the success shown by RHW. I have only seen one or two other examples of truly successful partner programs and I think one of them might have been a health care site also purchased by OnTarget.
How much do you think OnTarget paid?
RegionalHelpWanted Sold To Warburg Pincus-Backed Firm For $100 Million
By Rafat Ali – Mon 11 Feb 2008 09:25 AM PST
RegionalHelpWanted.com, a network of about 350 geographically focused online job boards, has been bought out by OnTargetJobs.com, a Texas-based recruitment-site aggregator. RHW, launched in 1999 and based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., operates its sites under the “…HelpWanted.com” brand in U.S. and the “…JobShop.com” brand in Canada, and also owns dating site Cupid.com. Its revenue was estimated at $35 million annually, according to a Classified Intelligence e-mail alerts (not available online), who also reported the $100 million figure (not disclosed by the companies themselves).
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I was a recruitment specialist for RegionalHelpWanted.com. I ran both of their TulsaHelpWanted.com and BoiseHelpWanted.com sites. Their business model is absolutely terrible, but ontargetjobs did indeed buy them for $100 million.
** es ** I am delighted to stand corrected! Thank you for your comment.
I run a niche job board called SkilledWorkers.com. We operate primarily out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As an aside, the head office for HCareers.com in Vancouver and the business model for SkilledWorkers.com is loosely based on theirs.
In 2004 OnTargetJobs.com purchased HCareers.com for $14.4 million US on $7.2 in revenue a 2X earnings. I am curious to know:
Does RHW rely primarily on inbound opportunities for revenue or is there a inside/outside sales team generating $$?
Why do you think that RWH was purchased at ~3X revenue vs. the ~2X for HCareers.com?
**es** profitability!! market size and breadth as well. I am also curious about who does the selling at RWH…
rwh says they give their media partners 70% of revenue. How do they determine a partners share if there’s multiple media partners in a market? (ie 3 radio station each with different size audiences and each station running ads at varying frequencies)
OntargetJobs might as well sell off 3 of their divisions based on sub par perfromance and bad management-especially from the Hcareers website, which has gone down hill since 2008 with a lay off of nearly all their staff and very bad management team.