Moncton Firm Acquires Leading Atlantic Canadian Job Board
MONCTON–A New Brunswick technology firm has acquired Atlantic Canada’s largest online job board.
Moncton-based Alongside has purchased Atlantic job search giant CareerBeacon in a bid to better equip itself to connect employers and job-seekers.
Based in Moncton, Alongside helps employer recruitment efforts by providing a sophisticated software tool to vet candidates, with job posting and talent management capability.
“We plan to amplify our presence from coast to coast, and it’s going to benefit both companies, getting a bigger audience,” said Alongside CEO and co-founder Yves Boudreau.
“The more we can grow on both sides, job-seekers and employers, the better results everyone’s going to get. It’s pretty significant in terms of usage. Most companies in Atlantic Canada today that are recruiting here still use Career Beacon as one of their channels to get the word out. Traffic-wise there isn’t anything that would compare here.”
With the deal clinched, Boudreau promised “a regular cadence” of product updates in the coming months.
He said Alongside plans to tailor its services to the needs of job-seekers first, eventually introducing a suite of other tools and functionality for employers.
“Overall, our product will evolve at a much quicker pace than it’s ever done before,” he said.
Although unable to offer a specific price point, Boudreau said the acquisition involved a significant amount of money.
“This is very far from an ‘aqui-hire,’” Boudreau said, referring to an acquisition of employees from another company with no significant financial transaction.
By acquiring CareerBeacon, Alongside has recruited six employees to its staff of seven.
With an average of 2,000 active customers and 5,800 jobs posted monthly in 2021, Boudreau said the CareerBeacon accounts for about 70 percent of jobs posted in Atlantic Canada.
The acquisition is part of an effort to build a larger audience and offer services it has never been able to offer before, noted Boudreau.
“It’s going to help us move faster. We’re going to be able to build and offer a better product to the market, and just continually expand – and all under one roof,” he said.
“One challenge we’ve had with different parties involved was managing businesses with different visions for where this should go. Now that we’re all under one roof, we should be able to exponentially move faster.”
Complementary
CareerBeacon, formerly owned by Brunswick News, has worked with Alongside previously. Boudreau noted both companies have complementary missions.
Boudreau said Alongside helped to modernize the tech upon which CareerBeacon relied. It was from that point on that Alongside began to manage the technology powering the platform.
Since its re-launch in May 2018, CareerBeacon has seen 201,847 jobs posted, with an average of 4,925 jobs posted monthly and 2,038 active employers in the past year.
Since Alongside’s founding in 2014, it has provided a job applicant tracking system. One of its software’s features was that it could distribute information to different job boards, including CareerBeacon.
“We’ve had a long-standing relationship with CareerBeacon since we started our company,” he said.
“From that time, we built our relationship with CareerBeacon, when they wanted to offer all our products to their customers.”
This eventually became a regular partnership in which Alongside would white-label its products and services to CareerBeacon, which offered Alongside’s applicant tracking technology to its customers.
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].