14 DAY TRIAL // Your next career move could involve Microsoft. As of yesterday, May 9, 2007, the Redmond Company has announced the acquisition of a minority equity stake in CareerBuilder.com. Although neither Microsoft, nor Gannett, The McClatchy Company and Tribune, the owners of CareerBuilder.com revealed the size of the minority equity stake, speculations point to 4% of the company.
The minority equity stake purchase in the largest online job website in the United States comes on the heels of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates comments related to the evolution towards the digital media at the company's Strategic Account Summit 2007.
"It's not a world where you have a single person who can deliver things like the classified ads, you have many people competing. So it's fascinating to look at, say, job markets within a city, or the nationwide job markets, and look at to the degree it's new people who've done that well, or it's traditional media people who have come in. One thing we can say for sure, it's a far richer experience for the person who has [to] list and find that job, and far more competitive in terms of the rate of innovation that those things are going to take place," Gates stated.
Moreover, Microsoft also announced the expansion of the strategic alliance between MSN and CareerBuilder, a move that is designed to let the Redmond Company recuperate some of the territory it has lost to Google.
Through its part in CareerBuilder, Microsoft has tapped a resource of 21 million unique visitors per month, a number that has been continuously expanding since 2004, when it was just 10 million. Additionally, the role of the exclusive job search engine on the MSN Careers channel has been attributed to CareerBuilder for $443 million over the next seven years.
"Microsoft has had a strong relationship with CareerBuilder for over three years and helped it rise to top of the industry," said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president and chief media officer for MSN at Microsoft. "Taking an equity stake in the most prominent job site in the U.S. presents a unique opportunity to enhance our business relationship. In addition, the agreement to share our global footprint with CareerBuilder unites our worldwide technology and information channels and gives users access to unmatched job search and job distribution resources."