Is Yahoo! HotJobs for Sale?

There’s been much speculation over the past weeks concerning whether Yahoo!’s HotJobs is up for sale or not.

While the simple answer seems to be “who knows”, and the company itself is refusing to comment, it’s worth taking a closer look at some of the issues behind the speculation.

Yahoo! HotJobs is one of the top three US jobs search engines. Alongside market leader careerbuilder.com and monster.com it competes for the web traffic of job-seeking Americans, and also contains international job listings.

HotJobs is a subsidiary of Yahoo!, and so falls under the control of newly appointed CEO, Carol Bartz. All eyes have been on the search giant since her arrival earlier this year.

HotJobs was founded by Richard Johnson in 1996, before being taken over in 2002 by Yahoo!, creating Yahoo! HotJobs. Yahoo! Paid $433 million for the company, and beat monster.com to the purchase.

Rumours that Yahoo! was considering a sale broke earlier this month in the New York Times alongside news of staff layoffs at the company. The Times reported:

“Under Ms. Bartz, Yahoo has also been trying to sell some business units that it doesn’t consider core to its mission, including Hotjobs, the online recruiting service, according to several people familiar with the plans.”

Just before the rumours broke, Kevin Krim, who was vice president of product and strategy for Yahoo HotJobs and Yahoo Small Business, revealed he was off to work for Bloomberg, which some believe also unsettled the marketplace a little.

The big worry was for the nearly 800 Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members, who joined the consortium mainly for the access to job listings and exposure through co-branded websites. The Newspaper Consortium has been one of Yahoo! HotJob’s success stories, and is no doubt responsible in part for the company’s accelleration towards monster.com in the rankings. Opinion varies over whether the Newspaper Consortium will be a priority for Yahoo! going forward.

So far Yahoo! has declined to comment on the rumours over a possible sale of HotJobs except to say that it doesn’t respond to rumours.

Emily Fox, a spokeswoman for Yahoo, told the AIMGroup that HotJobs was doing well, saying:

“We don’t know what’s coming down the road. We don’t want to get caught three months down the road having said something because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”

One blogger has speculated on possible buyers for HotJobs, ruling out careerbuilder.com but leaving a host of possibles including monster.com, News Corp, Microsoft, Dice or Jobing.

So HotJobs might, or might not be, up for sale. The current economic climate won’t help, but either way, Yahoo! is under close watch from the press.

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