Australiaís bluecollar.com.au site hits funding wall

One of the oldest and most respected Australian niche job boards in Australia and New Zealand, bluecollar.com.au, has gone into liquidation.

bluecollar.com.au was launched more than four years ago by senior recruitment industry executive Chris McKay as major shareholder and CEO, and since then has steadily built a strong following from both blue-collar and technical employees and major employers and labour hire companies in Australia and Globally.

bluecollar.com.au also launched a specialist website justengineers last year.

But while traffic and revenues had grown steadily and the business was profitable, the business had been seriously under-funded since its launch, said McKay.

He said that to push the business to the next level, it needed additional investment in marketing and promotion to build its brand awareness and penetration in the candidate market.

McKay said he and his fellow investors had sought the extra capital, and while they had positive feedback from some venture capital companies and other jobs board, they werenít happy with the direction in which they wanted to take the business.

McKay said the liquidator, BDO Kendalls, had major interest from investors in Bluecollarís assets from both within Australia, the UK and USA from existing operators keen to start operations in the Australian market through an already established operation in both the trades and engineering sectors.

He said he had also been pleasantly surprised by the level of industry support from advertisers and recruitment executives since the announcement. He said it was clear the recruitment industry could see the benefit of having more than just a few major job boards in the online employment space.

Domain licences, candidate databases for sale
Meanwhile, liquidator of the bluecollar business, BDO Kendalls, will offer its candidate databases and over 175 domain names for sale. The BDO representative is Jonathan Yee in Melbourne Australia and he can be contacted on 613 8320 2241 or email jonathan.yee@bdo.com.au or media enquiries can be directed to c.mckay@workcorp.com.au