No time to relax in France’s job board market. One acquisition is chasing another: while only one week ago, CareerBuilder bought the LesJeudis Group (even if no official figures have been communicated, Le Figaro and L’Expansion estimated a 50 million euro transaction value), StepStone yesterday announced the take over of the French LVE Group.

This is the second move on the French market within just seven months; only in december 2007, the Norwegians had acquired the niche site Sourcéa. This time, 3.6 million euros have been paid in cash. Further payments will be made in 2009 depending on financial results. Intelligent idea.

Let’s talk about Village Emploi: the group hosts three specialised career portals. Marketvente for marketing and sales jobs, Jobtech for technical profiles and AdminCompta for finance, accountability and office administration roles. According to the press release, LVE is planning an annual yield of 1.2 million euros for 2008.

Nice move from StepStone (and the timing is perfect). However, I think that LesJeudis would have been a better match for them: more IT, more engineering, more candidate management software and more revenue (they achieved a turnover of 10 million euros in 2007 with a margin of 40 percent). LesJeudis have been looking for a purchaser for a while already. I assume that the StepStone deal “we’ll pay a first installment, the second depends next year’s results” did not sound appealing to LesJeudis’ CEO Cédric Barbier. Or they simply were too expensive for them.

So now we have Adenclassifieds, Monster, Régionsjob, CareerBuilder and StepStone in France. Time will tell if there is enough space for yet another player to come. Let’s wait and see what the coast might wash ashore (I will tell no more)….