Trinity Mirror laps up another job site

LONDON: Newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror Plc. has acquired another web-based jobs site, SecsintheCity.com, specialising in secretarial and administrative job postings. The company has paid 3.5 million pounds in cash for Paldonsay Ltd, the parent company of High Street Direct Ltd, which owns the website, set up in 2001 and solely run by founder and director Jon Grocott, 35, from his living room in Southfields.

Grocott, who had left his job with Schroders, and worked on the website, because he found a gap in the market for a site offering secretarial jobs, said the site at any given time offers 4,000 jobs, mostly in London. It has a system of placing paid advertisements, which are available for viewing by more than 200,000 visitors every month.

Grocott owns almost the entire holding in the website along with his family.

Trinity Mirror will initially pay 3.3 million pounds and there will be a deferred performance-related payment capped at 200,000 pounds.

This is Trinity Mirror’s third acquisition in the job sites sphere. It had earlier bought general recruitment web business HotGroup, owners of workthing.com, hotrecruit.com, planetrecruit.com and jobsfinancial.com, for 50.5 million pounds, and Gaapweb.com, a site for accountancy and finance-related jobs, for 13 million pounds. Besides, it has acquired a property sales website, smartnewhomes.com, for an initial11.3 million pounds and a further performance-related 5.3 million pounds.

Trinity Mirror’s chief executive Sly Bailey said SecsintheCity.com is a great brand and fits extremely well with its recruitment sites across the U.K. “Digital is a key driver of our growth strategy and recruitment is an important pillar of our advertising revenue, which makes SecsintheCity.com another perfect fit for Trinity Mirror,” he said.