Yesterday StepStone has bought the French site Sourcea that is specialised in jobs for BA graduates, students who have obtained an apprenticeship degree (Bac to Bac+3 – Bac corresponds to the A-Levels) and school leavers. The sectors that are covered by the career portal include banking, telesales, secretarial work and marketing.

The sum of the transaction – paid in cash – amounts to 1.5 million Euros and is realtively small but, given their size (about 2,500 jobs online) and specialty, adequate. One thing is certain: Sourcea shows a very good potential for growth since the number of French candidates seeking for work in lower management and wholesale is high. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the former Sourcea owners have negotiated (c.f. press release) “further payments in 2009 dependent upon financial performance in 2008.”

The StepStone Group hasn’t made any acquisitions in France for more than seven years. And the French StepStone site is far from being as successful as its neighbouring Belgian or German versions. Therefore there have always been strong national job site partners like emailjob.com (acquired by Monster in 2005) or keljob.com (since 2005).

But the co-operation with keljob within the “Network” does not seem to be sufficient for the Norwegians anymore. In the press release Colin Tenwick, StepStone CEO, states:

The acquisition enables us to widen our strategy of acquiring successful online job board properties and utilising our expertise and resources to accelerate their market positions, and consolidate our leadership in France, which we believe offers considerable growth potential.

But why have they chosen Sourcea? StepStone considers itself as a job board for high potentials and highly qualified applicants, in particular in the domains of IT and finance. So why buy a career portal specialised in low management (if management at all)? The only logic reason I see for this is the continuously strategic transformation of Sourcea into a generic job board destined for graduates of lower and higher university degrees alike. Given the complex and intertwined nature of the French job board market, this will be the only means for StepStone to gain a foothold. I’m interested to see how this will develop in 2008.