For Whom The Bell Tolls

Well, the hammer finally fell at Jobster, almost a week after CEO Jason Goldberg (famously?) flew off his blog handle.

His latest post explaining the firing of 60 employees (about 40% of their workforce) doesn't really offer all that much in terms of going-forward strategy except to say that they got rid of their highest priced (and presumably least revenue generating) employees. There's some vague references into turning Jobster.com into a useful, game-changing, consumer/jobseeker-facing site, but as they say in farming, I'm not counting those chickens until they hatch. Jobster will still offer their enterprise-level products, but it looks like they are pursuing a VAR sales channel as opposed to a direct sales/support force. My hunch is that some of what Jobster has offered as part of their enterprise-level offering will be broken into smaller a la carte options to be sold over the phone. No one was ever able to really explain to me what Jobster did/does, so I can't tell what those options might be.

In any case, good luck to the 60 or so newly jobless folks.

UPDATE: OK, so maybe not all 60 employees are so sad about the layoff...that, if anything spells real trouble for Jobster. Blog post here. Really damning quote: "The only tears I saw were shed by employees who weren't laid off". Ouch!

OK, that's it for now -- karma can be a real bitch, so I'll lay low!