Rumor came that the Baijob, a recruitment-site project from Baidu will have been cut off without keeping the whole office. Later in that week, Baijob claimed that it was actually undergoing some strategic restructuring, and a layoff is needed for an optimal team.
Staff from Baijob also revealed that in the future the project will still go on with the focus on the search platform Baidu had set. Baijob’s recruitment information will be merged into the Baidu’s search page plus the information from other job-hunting sites.
Founded in January 2011, Baijob has been operated as a stand-alone subsidiary of Baidu focusing on job-searching and human resource services. Having offices in cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Jinan, it used to have a total of 400 staff, including a technology team and advertising team.
In the past founding days of Baijob, the search giant did spend large amounts of cash poaching senior players in other recruitment sites such as 51job, zhaopin.com or chinaHR. CEO Li zhenwen, a recruiting veteran with 8 years’ experience in zhaopin.com as the vice-president was one of the elites team Baijob had carefully built.
Moreover, in the first years, Baidu reportedly put in RMB100m in total, and supported this subsidiary with various promoting resources from SEM, Baidu Union, which could be equivalent to another RMB 100m. The original goal was to reach top three in the online recruitment market, however, it lost a CTO within a year, and a CEO after a year.
Well, we are sad to see that after B2C, C2C and micro-blogging, this is another malnourished business started by Baidu which is not search oriented.
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