Quikr acquires Babajob, the blue collar job listing company

Quikr already has a large base of 8 million active job seekers.

Quikr India has acquired the blue collar job listing company Babajob in a share swap deal to strengthen its position in the blue collar job segment. This acquisition will make Quikr the leading blue collar job listing company in the industry, helping entry level professionals, drivers, call centre professionals  and others.

Quikr has been on an acquisition spree to strengthen its position in the real estate, jobs, automobiles and services industries. So far it has acquired 11 small startups. Hiree was its first acquisition in the online job marketplace.

Quikr already has a large base of 8 million active job seekers, where around 2 lakh job applications are seen per day. This acquisition will add a further 7 million job seekers and 4,50,000 employers to its database.

The founder of Babajob Blagsvedt said, “The Babajob board, Vir and I decided that joining forces with Quikr represented our best option for scaling Babajob’s mission – providing better jobs for everyone by helping employers digitally hire aspiring workers. QuikrJobs has achieved profitability and a leadership position in India’s blue collar jobs market.”

The acquired firm will run as a separate entity and the founders will act as advisories to the merged entity temporarily. The core team of Babajob is said to have been retained after the merger.

It is also learnt that Babajob was not able to raise funding and was on a cost cutting spree. It had reduced the number of employees from 600 to 50.

The largest investor in Babajob was SEEK, the Australian online job marketplace with stake of around 40 percent. The company which was valued at $25 billion when it started, has got low valuation on this merger.