Home > Totaljobs slashes marketing and cuts jobs in Germany
Totaljobs slashes marketing and cuts jobs in Germany
11/10/08
The financiers of the long-awaited launch on the German market of the UK's number one job portal Totaljobs have pulled their support for the launch, citing the turmoil in financial markets for their decision. Instead of the planned high-profile launch with a big marketing and advertising budget, Totaljobs.de will now launch in December on a shoestring.
According to an internal memo, which landed in the hands of jobs blogger Thorsten zur Jacobsmühlen, money might still be spent on marketing once the financial crisis has blown over. The UK owners obviously do not expect that point to be reached soon, because it fired (almost) the whole Munich-based team, assembled earlier this year to develop a German version of the successful UK portal. Only two members will remain in Munich, as most of the management functions were relocated to the Netherlands and UK.
Thorsten zur Jacobsmühlen, author of the blog Blogaboutjob.de, reported the marketing budget for the launch originally amounted to €5 million ($6.45 million). He published an extract from an internal memo which made the rounds in the Munich office, explaining the new plans:
"The current economic environment is no time to undertake a full launch. We will make a slow entry to the market at the end of 2008 with the high quality product that has been developed in the last few months. There will be no major marketing investment and we will offer a selection of companies the opportunity to post their jobs in 2009 at no cost to them. This will give us time to perfect our product, until the market conditions improve, when will be the time to invest fully into a product that provides excellent matching and high quality applications," the company said.
Totaljobs.de belongs to the Totaljobs Group, operator of 12 job portals, among others Carterer.com and CatererGlobal.com. In turn, the Totaljobs Group belongs to the Reed Elsevier Group, a global publishing company employing about 37,000 people.
When the German version of Totaljobs goes live in December, it'll be the second Totaljobs site on Continental Europe. The first was Totaljobs.nl, which launched back in 2004 and has since dug itself into the Dutch market. According to Blogaboutjob.de the fired sales director Francisco Ferrando Ramirez said Totaljobs offered very good severance packages - even to employees still in probation.
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