StepStone acquires Les Villages Emploi

StepStone, the global provider of Total Talent solutions, today announced the acquisition of Les Villages Emploi (LVE), a French group of four websites including one aggregator site and three specialised market job boards. The sites cover a broad range of employment opportunities including Technical positions, Sales and Marketing, Administration, Finance and Accounting roles.

This acquisition marks StepStone's second acquisition in the French market in the past six months, and will complement the company's existing French businesses, which includes job boards Sourcea.fr, acquired in December 2007, and StepStone.fr. In addition, StepStone Solutions France offers the full range of Talent Management solutions to customers such as LVMH, EDF, and Caisse d'Epargne.

Founded in 1999 by Claude Lvy, LVE typically carries over 3 000 job vacancies across the three specialised boards, jobtech.fr focussed on Technical jobs; marketvente.fr covering Sales and Marketing jobs and admincompta.fr offering Administration, Finance and Accounting roles. All vacancies are also advertised on the general site, lve.fr.

StepStone has acquired LVE for an initial consideration of ?3.6 m, to be settled in cash, together with further payments in 2009 dependent upon financial performance in 2008. Claude Lvy will stay with the business and continue to lead the LVE team reporting into Valrie Vaillant, Directeur Gnral StepStone France Online. The LVE websites will continue to operate independently alongside StepStone.fr and Sourcea.fr, which provide complementary job board resources and related services. LVE is expected to generate over ?1.2m of revenue in 2008 and be EBITDA accretive to StepStone.

Ralf Baumann, Group Managing Director of StepStone Online, commented, I am pleased to welcome Claude and the LVE team to our expanding French business. With a superb reputation for delivering quality results to their customers, this acquisition continues our strategy of offering our broad range of Talent Management solutions across multiple specialist job sites, supported by our generalist site Stepstone.fr.

I am delighted to be joining StepStone and look forward to leveraging the experience and resources of such a successful business to deliver even better value to our customers and job seekers, said Claude Lvy, founder of LVE.

Colin Tenwick, CEO of StepStone concluded, The combination of our job board business and our software-as-a-service Solutions business places StepStone in a unique market position and allows us to offer the full range of Talent Management Solutions for the important French market. Building on the earlier acquisition of Sourcea.fr, I believe revenues from our StepStone team in France will make a significant contribution to our success in 2008 and beyond.