CareerBuilder expands into employee benefits and talent management with Workterra acquisition

Recruitment services giant CareerBuilder has acquired Workterra, a cloud-based technology company specializing in human capital management (HCM).

Founded in 1995 as NetStart Inc., CareerBuilder has emerged as one of the biggest brands in online recruitment. While it’s perhaps best known for the CareerBuilder.com recruitment website, it also provides human resources software as a service (SaaS) to companies, covering job listings, sourcing, workflow, analytics, CRM, and more.

Workterra was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California. For the uninitiated, HCM focuses on a company’s need to match competencies with specific roles and is usually considered across three categories: acquisition (hiring), management, and optimization. In real terms, this can mean administering employee benefits or ensuring the workforce is fit and healthy.

Above: Workterra

Today’s news is the latest in a long line of strategic acquisitions from CareerBuilder, as the Chicago-based company looks to diversify its recruitment smarts. Earlier this year, it expanded into background screening and drug testing with the acquisition of Aurico, and last year it snapped up Dutch company Textkernel for its semantic job search technology. Back in 2014, CareerBuilder bought out Broadbean, a London-based HR software firm.

So what CareerBuilder has effectively done through its recent surge in acquisitions is to position itself as the go-to service for a company’s entire HR needs, including pre-hire and post-hire services.

“CareerBuilder has reinvented who we are as a company over the last few years,” said CEO Matt Ferguson, in a press release. “This acquisition is a defining moment because it enables us to step beyond recruitment and become an end-to-end human capital management firm. Workterra is a fast-moving, fast-growing company with deep functionality built from the ground up. Working together, we will bring an unprecedented scope of innovation to market that will solve critical issues clients face in hiring, developing, and managing employees.”

This is the latest in a series of notable movements in the online recruitment space. Last month, recruitment giant Monster was acquired by Randstad for $429 million, just months after Monster itself had bolstered its mobile recruitment credentials with the acquisition of job search startup Jobr.

Elsewhere, we’ve seen a number of investments in the recruitment realm — in 2016 alone, Muse has raised $16 million to grow its recruitment service for millennials, following Jobandtalent’s $42 million raise and Job Today’s $10 million round. Hired also nabbed $40 million and acquired three companies, while Handshake raised $10.5 million to help college students search for jobs and internships.