JobShark.com Enters South American Market with CDN$7.5 Million Deal

JobShark Launches JobShark Chile; First of Five Countries on the Continent the Canadian Internet Recruitment Firm Has Targeted for Expansion.

TORONTO, Canada - April 11, 2000 - JobShark.com, Canada’s leading online recruitment service, announced today the launch of JobShark Chile in a CDN$4.5 million licensing agreement. JobShark maintains majority control of JobShark Chile, while minority interests are held by MaST Americas, and Iberoamarican Media Holdings Chile, S.A.

JobShark and MaST Americas also agreed to a CDN$3 million investment in operational services, which include sales, customer service and infrastructure, for four additional South American countries: Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil. With the move into Chile, JobShark is the first North American online recruitment service to establish a presence in South America.

"JobShark is very excited about the opportunity to enable Chilean businesses to quickly and cost effectively recruit highly qualified professionals," said Christopher Klotz, CEO of JobShark. "Also, Chileans, in diverse industry sectors, will have access to JobShark.com and our proprietary JAWS technology that will match them with their dream jobs."

With a population of over seven million in Santiago, Chile, one million of whom are online, the country is the ideal springboard for JobShark to break into the important South American market and its growing tech-savvy workforce.

"We have established a great partnership that will deliver an invaluable service to companies and people across the continent. By the middle of the year, more than 48 million South Americans will be on the Internet," said Andrew Macdonald, Regional Director for MaST. "They're embracing technology at a phenomenal rate. In one week of initial promotion, JobShark Chile attracted 7,000 job seekers and we expect incredible growth in the coming months."

The deal will strengthen JobShark’s international brand and will further build JobShark’s Global Network, which now spans Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Since the beginning of 1999, JobShark has grown from eight employees to 67 and has expanded its worldwide database of 80,000 job seekers to more than 320,000.

According to Forrester Research, online recruiting is expected to rise from US$265 million in 1999 to US$7.1 billion in 2003 and International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that 96 per cent of all companies will be using the Internet to recruit employees by the year 2001.

JobShark is one of a select group of Canadian e-commerce companies that is making an impact on the global stage. Last October, JobShark expanded into the United Kingdom, forming JobShark UK, which registered 48,000 job seekers in its first five months of operations.

Founded in 1997, JobShark is Canada’s largest online recruiting service with a database of more than 275,000 registered job-seekers and more than 1,000 corporations that use JobShark on a regular basis. JobShark’s proprietary skill set matching software, JAWS, e-mails job postings directly to job seekers whose skills match what the client is looking for. JobShark has Canadian offices in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal and internationally in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Chile.

For more information please contact:

Christopher Klotz
JobShark.com
613-789-3219

Matthew von Teichman
JobShark.com
416-944-2444

Erin Pavey
Hill and Knowlton
416-413-4747