By Dietrich Knauth
NEW YORK, July 21 (Reuters) - CareerBuilder + Monster plans to sell its once-dominant online job boards to Bold Holdings for $28 million, after a bankruptcy auction nearly quadrupled an initial offer for those assets.
CareerBuilder + Monster, which filed for Chapter 11 protection in June, announced the winning bid in court documents filed Saturday. The company will ask a U.S. bankruptcy judge to approve the sale at a court hearing in Wilmington, Delaware on Thursday.
CareerBuilder + Monster entered bankruptcy with an initial offer of $7 million from JobGet, which has an app that connects gig workers with jobs. JobGet was the runner-up in the auction after increasing its offer to $27 million, according to court documents.
Bold, which was founded by two former employees of Monster.com, owns resume and cover letter builders, job search sites and networking platforms. It acquired ResumeBuilder.com and Sonara.ai, an AI-powered job search platform, in 2024.
Bold’s purchase agreement commits it to hiring 350 full-time employees from CareerBuilder + Monster, according to court documents. CareerBuilder + Monster had 935 full-time employees at the time of its bankruptcy filing.
CareerBuilder + Monster also named winning bidders for its other assets.
The company plans to sell its media properties, www.military.com and www.fastweb.com, to Valnet US for $27.25 million, and its government services business, which provides HR software services to state and federal governments, to Sherrill-Lubinski LLC & Eti-Net Inc. for $13 million.
The final bids for the job boards, the media properties and government services business totaled $57 million, compared to roughly $35 million in initial bids for those assets at the start of CareerBuilder + Monster’s bankruptcy.
Created through the September merger of CareerBuilder and Monster, CareerBuilder + Monster is owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management and Dutch staffing company Randstad.
The company has $392.5 million in debt, and it said the merger failed to address long-term challenges like CareerBuilder’s high debt load and increased competition from companies like ZipRecruiter and Indeed.
The case is ZenJV LLC, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, No. 25-11195
For CareerBuilder+Monster: Ray Schrock, Candace Arthur and Jonathan Gordon of Latham & Watkins, among others
Read more:
CareerBuilder + Monster, which once dominated online job boards, file for bankruptcy
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