Workopolis

» see workopolis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nobody is nostalgic for a job board. There is no forum thread of people remembering the interface fondly, because every hour anyone ever spent on one was spent under some amount of pressure, and the good outcome was leaving and not coming back. This is why job boards die without obituaries even when they were national infrastructure, and Workopolis was national infrastructure.

It began as the careers section of The Globe and Mail in 1999. Torstar, which owns the Toronto Star, came in the following year and the joint venture took the name Workopolis. Gesca, the newspaper arm of Power Corporation in Quebec, joined in 2002, and by October 2006 the Globe had sold out and the site was split evenly between a Toronto owner and a Montreal one.

Read that ownership list again, because it is the whole point. Canada's job board was owned by Canada's newspapers, ran in English and French because the country runs in English and French, and kept offices in eight cities. It handled online recruitment for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Turkey's version of this shape is kariyer.net and it stayed in local hands, which is the outcome Workopolis did not get.

~ the dossier ~

~ the business it was in ~

A job board makes money twice. Employers pay to post and to search the resume database, and the traffic that makes those postings worth paying for comes from job seekers who pay nothing. Workopolis had around nine million resumes on file by the end and roughly seventeen million dollars a year coming in, which is a healthy small business and a rounding error against what was coming.

What was coming was Indeed, which did not sell postings so much as index everyone else's and put a search box in front of them. That model does not need newspapers or a bilingual sales team in eight cities. By the middle of the decade the Canadian market was already being decided somewhere other than Toronto.

~ the sale ~

On 4 April 2018 Recruit Holdings of Japan, which owns Indeed, announced that it was buying the website and assets of Workopolis. The price was reported around twenty five million dollars. Indeed's chief executive said the acquisition let the company expand its commitment to Canadian job seekers, which is the sentence every acquirer has ready before anyone asks.

About fifty Workopolis staff were let go on the day of the announcement, with three weeks of severance for each year worked and a small team kept on for roughly a month to move things onto Indeed's systems. The deal closed on 11 April. The company was gone in a week and the customers mostly did not notice, which is the thing about a job board: nobody logs in unless something in their life requires it.

~ what answers there now ~

This grave is for the independent job board and not for the domain. Type the address today and you get a page. Behind it is Indeed's Canadian listing inventory, served under the Workopolis name as part of a publisher network, which is a brand kept alive as a doorway because Canadians still type it.

That is a normal enough ending and it still leaves something worth marking. A country's own hiring market ran for eighteen years on a platform its own newspapers owned, and then the newspapers sold it, because the newspapers were in trouble and twenty five million dollars was real money to them. The listings did not move. The decisions about them moved to Austin and to Tokyo.

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