Career move… to Careers24

The news has kinda leaked out via my my LinkedIn status update – yes, it’s official, I’m moving over into the hot-seat in Careers24 as the new General Manager.

And I’ll be handing over my current responsibilities leading the central Development teams in the next month or so.

I’m super-excited about the move:

• I’ve been managing development, production and operations for other people for a long time.. this is my shot to get into the drivers seat and live or die by my own decisions
• Careers24 is sort-of the underdog in the market at the moment. There are a couple of strong competitors with a clear lead, and then a bunch of noisy job boards all fighting for attention. It’s good to have clear targets.
• It should be run with a much stronger technical focus in my opinion, but it hasn’t been until now. Looking for a job is all about search, and so is searching CVs. I plan on rolling out kick-ass search and matching functionality to both sides of the customer base.
• It’s a really interesting business model – if you want to get clever about it, it’s a platform business in a 2-sided market, with strong cross-side network effects. Actually 2 markets (for jobs & candidates), each with cross-side network effects, and the possibility to cross-subsidise across markets too.
• I’ve got great support from News24, and they are cooking at the moment… we got 250k+ South African users in a single day on Tuesday this week. Couldn’t ask for a better partner to build audience.
• I get to stay at 24.com and work with a great bunch of people. The saying is that familiarity breeds contempts, but it’s also great to be operating as part of a big team, with lots of collective experience, and niche expertise tucked away all over the place. Need some SEO advice? No problem. Want to test UI? Sure. Got deep database questions? Sorted.

Any time I move on from one role to another I feel like I’m leaving things undone, and if I’d just stayed a bit longer I could have made a bigger difference, but I’m pleased to say that the dev and design teams seem to be doing fine with only minimal interference from me, and they could probably do with someone new to join them in my place and bring some new perspective and experience to the table.

Watch this space…

Careers24 Jobs Online: 5306

Registered Users: 298211

I hope to report good things in the coming months.

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