LinkedIn will acquire Bright, another site for job seekers and recruiters, for $120 million.
Bright is a job-seeking site that uses its unique scoring system to match employers with people looking for a job. Bright’s technology reviews the resume of a job seeker and assigns it a score. The idea behind Bright, according to its website, is to eliminate clutter for those hiring new employees. Rather than comb through countless applications and resumes, a company can use a person’s Bright score to whittle down the field of prospective hires.
Recode reports that the $120 million sale price includes $32.4 million in cash and the remainder in Bright stock. The report also notes that this is LinkedIn’s largest purchase of another company since it launched. This could be an example of the bigger company absorbing its fastest-growing competition.
There are about 277 million users on LinkedIn. LinkedIn already has a similar job-matching service for companies in its Talent Solutions feature. On the site’s blog, Vice President of Product Parker Barille writes that buying Bright allows LinkedIn to grow and its job-matching ability to improve:
“As we add more job listings over the next several years, Bright’s powerful matching technology will be integral to ensuring that the prospects we suggest to employers and opportunities we surface for prospects are increasingly relevant.”
Bright has been a popular destination since it launched the scoring system in June 2012. Since then, it has received more than 62 million unique visitors and nearly 63 million jobs have been posted there. The company has already raised more than $20 million in funding from Passport Capital, Toba Capital and angel investors, the company’s website says.
Eduardo Vivas, founder of Bright, said his company decided to join LinkedIn so it could apply the technology it created to a larger market. On his company’s blog, Vivas writes:
“We decided to join LinkedIn because of what we lacked – the ability to apply this technology across the entire economy. We share LinkedIn’s passion for connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale.”
Bright members and Hiring Solutions customers will still be able to access their information on the original Bright site until the end of February. When the sale is complete, “several members” of the Bright staff will join LinkedIn, according to the buyer’s announcement.
Image: Bright
That’s quite a sale considering Bright’s only been around since Feb 2011. Seems like a good move considering LinkedIn has an active jobs section.
Divine Rizardo
I guess that’s good news for both LinkedIn and Bright which is always the case for buy outs. Bright, clearly, couldn’t reach their full potential on their own. With LinkedIn buying them out, we can expect technology to turn things around for Bright.
Evidently the in-house Talent Solutions option was falling woefully short of expectations, because it seems like a large price tag to spend $120 million to replace it. However, it’s good to see some consolidation in this industry because it is a crowded space and makes it hard on job seekers and companies looking to hire.
Truly a good move by LinkedIn, hope this acquisition of bright brings a positive result for the unemployed division. Though the merger or acquisition are normal scenario nowadays.
I noticed that too, Steve. Over the past three months or so, there’ve been a lot of acquisitions happening. I do wonder why it’s happening more often.
Joe Lundy
This further exemplifies the reality that LinkedIn is positioning itself to be THE professional network, in the world. In fact, this makes it all the more important for anyone wanting to move up the ladder of success to have a LinkedIn marketing strategy, if the hope to be successful. Gone are the days where you apply for a position and it doesn’t matter if you have a profile on LinkedIn.
Can you imagine if Facebook tried to buy LinkedIn? 🙂 Maybe they’ve actually tried, or perhaps tried some years ago.
Anyway, I wonder what LinkedIn will try to acquire next?
Aira Bongco
Linkedin and job-matching? I guess it is a perfect match. I have always thought LinkedIn is a social network reserved for business. But it also allows better networking. Job matching is a good thing to introduce to a website as it can match employers with potential employees.
It makes sense that even if LinkedIn is indeed a social network for business, that they’d incorporate job matching. So you’re right, it is the perfect match.
I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the job section, though I do get notifications about it sometimes (as recently as yesterday). I should check it out. See the range they have.