CareerSite Execs Blame PowerOnes Owners

Several execs involved in CareerSite wrote into my personal site to weigh in on CareerSite's demise, its apparent neglect by the newspaper owners of PowerOne Media, and what it all might mean as Yahoo! tries to work with most of the same owners to rival Monster and CareerBuilder. They disagreed on several details. But they agreed that CareerSite was largely done in by its newspaper owners, which were seen as both indecisive and inept.

Former CTO Owen Medd, for instance, wrote in to note that “PowerOne and its constituent newspapers had the hubris to believe that they knew better about how to structure and integrate the recruitment application than those that had been on the leading edge of the technology while the PowerOne constituents were poo-pooing the whole Internet 'thing.' The result of this being that CareerSite has been mismanaged, initially by the Media News Group Interactive people and then more aggressively by the Power One Media people.”

Former PowerOne Media CTO Issac Sacolick echoed Medd's views. “PowerOne Media's investors were never really ready to embrace the commitment and investments needed to build a national brand. And they were never strong enough to mange their local newspapers. PowerOne Media was caught in the middle of this struggle. Perhaps Yahoo/HotJobs, with its stronger brand and deeper pockets will have a better chance at success.”

An executive who remains at CareerSite, and asked to remain anonymous, similarly complained that there was “a complete lack of strategic direction from the investors to define, fund, and build a product and brand. … It is a sad event given that CareerSite has always had talented people wanting to make a difference but lacked investors with a strategic plan beyond acting as a low cost ASP that would answer to whichever schizophrenic newspaper group was currently screaming the loudest.”