onTargetjobs Announces Acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com

FORT WORTH, TX, February 8, 2008 – onTargetjobs, the leading niche Internet job board company, announced today its acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com, a network of over 350 geographically focused Internet job boards.

onTargetjobs is the parent company of BioSpace.com, Hcareers.com, HEALTHeCAREERS.com, MedHunters.com, JobLoft.com and CareerBank.com, providing online career services to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, hospitality, restaurant, healthcare, accounting and finance markets. RegionalHelpWanted offers the next wave of local advertising opportunities for employers through geo-specific Web portals heavily promoted through partnerships with over 2,000 local radio stations throughout North America. RegionalHelpWanted.com was represented by RBC Daniels in the transaction.

The acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com strengthens onTargetjobs’ position in the niche industry Web-based employment market, as Web-based “local” markets continue to grow in popularity as viable communities of job candidates. onTargetjobs offers staffing professionals and hiring managers the unique ability to reach with a high degree of specificity communities of industry and geographically-based candidates through a “1-Stop Contract” covering job postings, candidate databases, Web banners, electronic newsletters, career fairs, and other efficient and effective mediums.

“onTargetjobs is pleased to announce the acquisition of RegionalHelpWanted.com, as it helps to deliver with increased precision qualified candidates to businesses of all sizes,” said Allen Paschal, CEO of onTargetjobs. “As the effectiveness and popularity of niche Internet communities and employment sites grow to rival the larger horizontal job boards, the addition of RegionalHelpWanted.com’s geo-targeted audience diversifies and strengthens onTargetjobs’ value proposition to its existing industry-focused client base.”

Eric Straus, CEO of RegionalHelpWanted.com offered, “onTargetjobs was the partner of choice for us as they understand the niche job industry as well or better than any other company, and the complementary fit between both organizations is what set them apart. They are leaders in their field and the localization that we bring to them will allow for best of breed advertising solutions for the entire recruitment industry.”

Read more about onTargetjobs at www.ontargetjobs.com

About onTargetjobs

onTargetjobs (www.ontargetjobs.com) is the parent company of BioSpace.com (www.biospace.com), Hcareers.com (www.hcareers.com), HEALTHeCAREERS.com (www.healthecareers.com), MedHunters.com (www.medhunters.com), JobLoft.com (www.jobloft.com) and CareerBank.com (www.careerbank.com), providing online career services to the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, hospitality, restaurant, healthcare, accounting and finance markets.

onTargetjobs invests in leading niche internet job sites, serving a defined geographic or vertical industry or job function.

About RegionalHelpWanted.com

RegionalHelpWanted.com (www.regionalhelpwanted.com) owns and operates over 350 local job boards across the U.S. and Canada in strategic alliances with local broadcasters.

I am delighted to announce that JobLoft.com was given the 2007 Impact Entrepreneur of the Year award at the Impact Leadership Conference. The team over at Impact ran an amazing event and it was truly an honour to be in attendance. The night was topped off with a keynote speech by Canadian Billionaire Michael Lee-Chin that instantly resulted in a standing ovation.

The Impact Leadership Conference is the premier student entrepreneurship event in Canada. The conference attracts the best and brightest university, college, and high school students from the leading academic institutions. Student leaders with a passion for entrepreneurship and business gather in downtown Toronto to learn, discuss, and network with their peers and distinguished members of the business community.

Hcareers’ parent company onTargetjobs acquires JobLoft.com

Acquisition positions Hcareers as number one recruitment solutions provider for hospitality industry worldwide

Vancouver, Canada, October 29, 2007 – Hcareers, the leading online job board for the hospitality industry worldwide, announced today that its parent company, onTargetjobs, has acquired the assets of JobLoft.com, a cutting edge hospitality and retail job board located in Toronto, Canada. The combined companies now hold the number one spot as the dominant provider of online recruitment solutions for the hospitality industry.

The addition of JobLoft.com into the onTargetjobs family of job boards reaffirms onTargetjobs’ commitment to hospitality recruitment professionals and jobseekers worldwide, both in the hourly and managerial markets. JobLoft.com’s concentration on the hourly jobseeker looking for local jobs coupled with Hcareers’ worldwide reach and industry presence enables Hcareers to provide a more holistic solution to its hospitality, restaurant and foodservice clients.

JobLoft.com’s state of the art technology platform and rich Web 2.0 functionality provide the ultimate user experience. Using JobLoft.com, jobseekers can find employment opportunities in their community, and then have them visually displayed using Google Maps’ technology. JobLoft.com’s technology applications fit perfectly with onTargetjobs’ dedication to giving the hospitality industry jobseeker the opportunity to find the most suitable job to fit their needs and experience level.

“This is such a great move for the hospitality industry as a whole,” said Chris Nguyen, CEO of JobLoft.com. “Our loyal following in the hourly job seeker space is going to flourish from this new ownership as we’ll now be able to expand the opportunities available to job seekers in their own communities”

Since 1998, Hcareers has been providing the hospitality industry with an online job board specifically targeted to the industry. Job openings are delivered to the ever-expanding Hcareers network of partner career centers, including those of the national, provincial and state hospitality and restaurant associations, bizjournals’ regional business journal websites and the International CHRIE member schools, which comprise the bulk of the culinary management and hotel management schools worldwide.

“We are ecstatic to be able to have the JobLoft team join our family and together with the existing Hcareers product offering, we will leverage the excellent technological advancements that JobLoft offers the hourly hospitality and retail marketplaces,” said Allen Paschal, CEO of OnTargetjobs. “With name brand clients such as Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Hudson’s Bay Company, and Sobeys, JobLoft has developed an excellent reputation within the industry.”

For more information on Hcareers visit www.hcareers.com, for onTargetjobs visit www.onTargetjobs.com and for JobLoft.com visit www.jobloft.com.

About Hcareers
Hcareers is the leading job board for the hospitality and restaurant/foodservice industries. A unit of onTargetjobs out of Fort Worth, Texas, Hcareers is known for being the leader in providing industry-specific online recruitment solutions with the most relevant jobs and job seekers in their niche market and has rapidly become the number one choice for both job seekers and employers in the hospitality and foodservice industry worldwide. For more information about Hcareers’ online recruitment solutions, visit http://www.hcareers.com/.

About onTargetjobs
onTargetjobs is the parent company of Applied Recruitment Technologies (HEALTHeCAREERS.com), Hcareers, CareerBank.com, BioSpace.com and MedHunters.com and provides online career services to the accounting, biotech, finance, insurance, healthcare, insurance, pharmaceutical, hospitality and restaurant markets. onTargetjobs invests in leading niche Internet job sites, serving a defined vertical industry or job function. The company’s operating philosophy is to invest in strong management teams who continue to operate the acquired company, with onTargetjobs assisting through capital, consultative and other resources to enable accelerated company growth. OnTargetjobs is in partnership with Warburg Pincus, one of the oldest and largest private equity firms in the world with approximately $13 billion under management. For more information about onTargetjobs’ online career services, please visit http://www.onTargetjobs.com/.

About JobLoft.com
JobLoft.com is an online job board that lists retail, food services and hospitality postings based on geographic proximity. By entering a Canadian postal code, users can view nearby job postings using Google Maps software. After seeing the inefficiency of the traditional job search process, JobLoft.com’s founder teamed up with his classmates to make his vision a reality. To learn more about JobLoft’s online job board, please visit http://www.jobloft.com/.

Come visit our booth at the National Job Fair & Training Expo happening on Sept. 25 - Sept 26 2007.

The event will take place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre (Exhibit hall C) from 10am - 7pm.

This will be a sepecial year for JobLoft.com as we have partnered with the organizers of this great event. The retail employer section will be called the “JobLoft.com alley”

Stop by our booth and say hello!!! We hope to see you there!

 For more information on this event, click here

With a special thank you to Zuraidah Alman, JobLoft.com made a guest appearance on Global Morning News Toronto to discuss our innovative website, what makes us truly unique and how the idea was started.

We love sharing our message and helping people find jobs. Thanks to the staff & crew at Global TV!!

left to right: Alan Carter, Sunny Mokha, Chris Nguyen, Zuraidah Alman

Named after Ryerson alumnus and founder of the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, the 2007 Isadore Sharp Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was given to our team here at JobLoft.com. We are the youngest recipients to receive this prestigious award.

It is a great honour to be recognized by Ryerson for our hard work and efforts. Sunny, Andy, Lee and I have come a long way since we met in our first year ITM100 course.  It doesn’t get better than this!

Congratulations to the fellow recipients of the 2007 Alumni Achievement Awards:

Tania Bortolotto, Architectural Science ‘90
Bryan Cantley, Journalism ‘69
Sheri Cohen, Social Work ‘96
Tony Gagliano, Business Management ‘80
Jenny Gumbs, Public Administration ‘02

I wish everyone all the best, thank you to all for the kind words.

The journey continues…

To read about the event, click here.

For those who ever asked “what is JobLoft.com … how does it work?”, we have the answer!

We wanted something cool and hip, so with the help of the talented Valentin Kelemen, he was able to execute our vision. 

How did it turn out? you be the judge!

I hope you like it.

Great news in the JobLoft world!

We are proud to announce that JobLoft.com has partnered with Canada’s top social community website Nexopia.com for the summer. Utilizing JobLoft’s technology, we will power their job board with our current job postings. With the evolution of social community websites (MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc), we can now leverage the right demographic to fill Retail, Food Service and Hospitality positions faster!

Why Nexopia.com?

Nexopia.com Canada’s largest social community website. Over 95% of its users are Canadian and the site has become quite popular in western Canada, with over 1,000,000+ member.

See for yourself: www.nexopia.com

MAKING IT BIG

“Meet the next generation of successful Canadian businesspeople. With a little help from a national charity, these young entrepreneurs are taking chances, dreaming big and reaching for the stars. Remember these names, because these are the ones to watch.”

By: Emily Wexler

June/July 2007 City Life Magazine

Enjoy!

Click here to view the article!

Sheena’s place is a wonderful organization that is building hope and support for people with eating disorders. We are fortunate with the opportunity to sponsor an amazing event that is coming up on June 11 2007. “Kevin Clark – Skinny Dipping and other fun” is an event that will bring together 350 jazz fans for a musical night in town.

Below is our print advertisement that was created for Sheena’s Place. Kudos goes out to our intern Jonathan Cheng for creating this wonderful ad (see Jonathan, I told you that I’d give you a shout out! )

For more information on this event click here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOBLOFT.COM!!!

Like the saying goes “success is not a destination, but a journey”.  Let’s just say, the past 365 days have been one interesting journey.

Trying to build a company is never easy. Our fledgling internet company has traversed more highs and lows over the past year than Tobey Maguire in the “Spiderman 1,2 &3″, but it’s has been a worthwhile and meaningful journey.  We’ve come out the other side a wiser, stronger and more determined company.

So let’s reminisce about the last 12 months in the life of Jobloft.com

• 15+ Newspaper articles
• 10+ TV spots
• 2 Dragons Den appearances
• 12,000+ Job postings

No complaints, no excuses and no regrets.

Thanks for all the support, this is just the beginning!

Although we had to wake up at 5:30 to be downtown by 6:45am…. it was well worth the wake up call!

Thanks go out for Mohit Rajhans for contacting us and the rest of the team at Breakfast TV for making it a pretty fun experience.

The topic of discussion with the lovely host Dina?? Helping students find jobs of course! JobLoft.com!

JobLoft.com featured in the Winter Ryerson Alumni Magazine.

No comments on the pic please.. faces only a mother could love! jk

Click here for article

What have we been up to?

It’s been awhile since we entered a blog post. I just wanted to give everyone an update on what we have been up to.

We’re working hard developing some very cool features for JobLoft.com. Our minds are always running a mile a minute but we had to take a step back to analyze which features would job seekers and employers want the most. Total we have 4-6 very creative ideas, we’re just putting the finishing touches on one feature we’re launching next month.

We’ve been having amazing feedback from job seekers and employers on how easy our site. It’s always nice to read emails from job seekers who found their job using our site.

Thanks to all the JobLoft supporters out there (you know exactly who you are), without your help we wouldn’t be here today. I guess everyone loves the underdog story.

“Hate it or love it, underdogs on top…” - 50 Cent

“You think you know? But you have no idea…..” - MTV Diary

JobLoft.com

First off, I want to say Thank You. Thanks to all the JobLoft.com supporters. We will use this opportunity to tell our side of the story. All we ask is for you to share our story with your friends, your relatives, your neighbour… anyone you can think of. We also want to hear your feedback, so feel free to add your comments below. If you’re making a blog post on your site, please use the trackback URL at the end of this posting.

As we always tell everyone, “there’s never a dull moment in the world of JobLoft”. In a nutshell, we had the money, the money was taken back, and we’re using this as a valuable learning experience. Please allow me explain in more detail.

From reading our last blog entry, no one could have predicted that we would end up without closing a deal with the dragons. However, the ending remarks from last blog that “‘success is not a destination…but a journey’, so hop on board, it’s going to be a fun ride” takes on a whole new meaning.

What we need to address first is that what was shown on TV was just a glimpse of what happened in that boardroom on a wonderful Halloween morning. Of course, it was edited for TV, and producers have a magical way making things look and feel a certain way for television. So what is being told here and now is the story of JobLoft.com “telling it how it is”.

From the taping of the deal in August and recalling the last thing Kevin said to us, “As soon as we finishing taping this show … I am in your face … I am in your face … Guaranteed! … and looking forward to it”. Trust us, no one was in our face. And that’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, nor are we blaming anyone. The dragons are busy individuals running their own corporations. A little different of a picture than what we originally imagined. 50% of your business to give up for partners who are tied up in their own businesses doesn’t quite bode well for JobLoft’s future. What ended up happening was that we spent a lot of time with lawyers and at the end of it all, left with a huge legal bill as a result.

Regardless of what the CBC portrayed during the show of Dr. Norrie (our advisor and former professor), the JobLoft team holds the utmost respect for Dr. Norrie, who comes from the high-tech industry, was an entrepreneur himself, and has immense credibility as a business person and as an academic. We are fortunate to have him as a mentor and we are willing to stand up for the best interests of the company. Does he have a vested interest in the company? Absolutely not. He has nothing to gain except to see his former students and now alumni, succeed in the business world as he did.

So what was our advisor trying to say that the CBC couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) show in a span of 3 minutes? Well, the dragons were talking about how to spend the $200,000 on marketing to employers ONLY. Dr. Norrie merely highlighted the fact that we should not focus only on employers but market to both job seekers and employers. Our company is unique, such that we need to market to both ends of the spectrum. Our advisor believes that because the dragons’ businesses require them to market to only 1 set of customers, they may not have been aware of this aspect of our company despite having a copy of our business plan. However, as some of you may saw, the whole thing sort of escaladed into something else.

Now it seems that we have a story of us, starting from scratch; getting investment and having the carpet pulled from underneath; all in a short period of time. We have to say that the outcome is for the best, and this was an excellent learning experience for all involved @ JobLoft. We are now able to seek greater investment, with a proper company evaluation that is not a made-for-TV drama, which will take JobLoft to a global playing field. So what did we do the day after that boardroom meeting? Business as usual.

Recently several leading venture capital and private equity funds have approached us indicating a strong interest in JobLoft. We’re open to ideas and we are not closing the doors on future investors. I guess there is sunshine outside the Dragons’ Den.

For the record, Chris Nguyen, CEO of JobLoft says, “I learned a lot about business when I was at Ryerson…but nothing prepared me for the harsh lessons about what can happen when things go so wrong, so fast. The coolest thing about it though, is that in retrospect I wouldn’t change a thing about what happened and learning is always a good thing. As we complete the search for appropriate investment partners in the coming weeks, I think the shareholders have realized that we are better off with this outcome than the alternative of a fractious board fighting about the right strategy for our company. I would never take an investment offer again without making sure everyone was aligned on the company strategy. No regrets, no hard feelings and my partners and I, and even our company advisors, all wish the Dragons well and hope they can say the same about us…”

We are very excited to hear all of your feedback on our involvement in the show and the turn of events. If you have any comments or questions, please leave us a note below.

If you would like to keep up with JobLoft, please feel free to sign up to either our press release distribution list or our periodic newsletter. Also, if you’re a member of the press and you’d like to know more about our side of the story, please email us at press@jobloft.com.