Career Beacon Gets Revamp With Help From New Brunswick Startup
MONCTON– A New Brunswick startup is helping an online job board move to the next level.
CareerBeacon, a leading Canadian job board and online recruitment solutions provider owned by Brunswick News, announced Tuesday that it has completely revamped its website with the help of Alongside.
Alongside is a Moncton-based hiring platform that aims to humanize the online hiring experience by bridging the communication gaps between employers and candidates.
Founded in 2014, Alongside has been one of the Top 25 Up and Coming Canadian ICT Companies by Branham300 and was also the first Atlantic Canadian startup to be accepted into 500 Startups, one of the world’s top startup accelerators.
Alongside co-founder and CEO Yves Boudreau says the partnership with Career Beacon came from an already established relationship. Employers using Alongside’s platform were already able to post their job postings directly to Career Beacon, along with many other job boards. However, Career Beacon was looking to expand its offerings.
“We just started increasing our conversations back and forth and eventually, someone tabled the idea of partnering because they were looking at expanding Career Beacon’s capabilities and services,” says Boudreau. “They were debating if it made more sense to do that or to partner with someone within the industry who essentially eats and breaths in the space. After a long process, we decided the partnership was the right move.
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Tuesday’s announcement was phase one of the two-phase release of new features for Career Beacon. This first phase focuses on the job-seeker, which includes a whole new look, faster search results, and improved mobile optimization
“A lot of people probably don’t know the history of Career Beacon, but it’s been around for quite some time. The way they had built it, there were some limitations around the ability to continue to expand around it without running into significant risks,” says Boudreau. “Especially on the mobile side, it was fairly limited on what you could do.”
Phase two, which will launch sometime this summer, will focus on the employers and will allow them to better manage their postings. The second phase will also include integration of Alongside’s services through Career Beacon.
“In addition to that, companies will want to use additional services like our Alongside applicant tracking system, which they’ll be able to directly opt into it,” says Boudreau. “Essentially anything they’ve created on Career Beacon will be available on our platform if they choose to enable it. They will be able to go back and forth between Career Beacon and Alongside very seamlessly.”
CareerBeacon holds the strongest market share in Atlantic Canada with over 44 per cent of its labour force using the platform. With half of Alongside’s market share in the region as well, Boudreau partnership was a good move.
“We thought this was a great opportunity to get our product directly involved in front of those companies in Atlantic Canada and then focus our energies to grow business outside of Atlantic Canada,” says Boudreau.
This will include a big announcement this fall regarding something the company has been working on since January. Boudreau, however, wouldn’t reveal many details.
“Let’s just say we’re significantly expanding on Alongside’s current capabilities,” he says.