TMP Worldwide Acquires FlipDog.com

Recruitment and yellow pages advertising giant TMP Worldwide, which owns Monster.com, is now the owner of competing jobs site FlipDog.com, through an acquisition designed to boost Monster’s paid job advertisements.

Few terms of the acquisition were disclosed, but it’s clear that New York-based TMP is less interested in FlipDog.com’s massive job listings (it lists about 600,000, while Monster hosts about 434,000) but rather, the Provo, Utah-based firm’s technology.

FlipDog.com’s former owner, WhizBang! Labs, Inc., specializes in online data extraction. That technology is at the heart of FlipDog.com’s job listing site: an information extraction engine finds and links to job-listing data on other Web sites, including “Powered by FlipDog” clients. This enables FlipDog.com to list many jobs described on the employment pages of companies’ own Web sites, increasing the number of listings available for searching. Monster.com would presumably then go after these companies with jobs to fill, seeking to entice them to purchase more prominent listings.

“The upside is incredible,” said TMP’s chairman and chief executive, Andrew McKelvey. “FlipDog.com will serve to drive new business leads for Monster and across TMP’s other businesses, while broadening and deepening the services we can provide to our clients.”

Indeed, McKelvey said he sees FlipDog.com continuing as its own Web site, but serving chiefly as a back-end data resource for TMP’s businesses, which includes not only Monster.com, but relocation site MonsterMoving.com and a classified, yellow pages and mainstream media recruitment advertising practice.

While the companies declined to discuss the arrangement in detail, the deal also specifies that WhizBang! Labs will help set up TMP’s implementation of FlipDog’s information extraction system.

“FlipDog.com brings incredible technology and content to the TMP family of companies,” said Mark Simonsen, who is president and chief executive of FlipDog.com. “Customers worldwide stand to benefit tremendously from combining the strengths of FlipDog.com with Monster.com, the most powerful online recruiting force in the market today.”

The FlipDog acquisition comes as Monster.com and TMP offered to buy a leading European recruitment site, Stockholm’s Jobline International AB.

That offer, tendered Friday, entails TMP offering cash for all of Jobline’s outstanding stock. Should the deal go through, Monster would add Sweden to its thirteen existing European sites.

As a result, McKelvey said Jobline would benefit from FlipDog’s services as well.

“FlipDog.com’s powerful technology will also be brought to bear upon our recently announced pending acquisition of Jobline to further drive our expansion in Europe,” he said. “As the completion of the Jobline acquisition increases our brand dominance throughout Europe, FlipDog.com’s information extraction technology will enhance our offerings and accelerate our business development growth.”