Juju, a poor man’s Indeed, quietly launched Glidepath in 2016. It was designed to be a recruiting platform for small businesses. Not necessarily a bad idea, but the timing was most definitely bad. Shortly after going to market, Google Hire came to town, in addition to Facebook, and Indeed went free.
The team of industry veterans, which included the likes of Mark Anderson, couldn’t compete in an already big pool with newer, bigger fish in it. It always seemed like a side gig anyway. With Google taking such a big bit out of job sites like Juju in the past year, throwing stuff to see if it sticks is no surprise. If Indeed is struggling, Juju certainly is too.
The first signs of cracking foundation happened back in January when headcount went down and social media stalled. “A few deck chairs shuffled as we change up our marketing and sales strategy,” assured Juju CEO Euan Hayward at the time. “But other than that chugging away.”
Six months later and chugging away looks a lot more like floating around in the dead pool. Although the site is still live and visibly accepting phone calls — you’ll only get a voicemail — no one is home.
“We shifted our focus away from Glidepath to our text platform Emissary,” said Brendan Cruickshank, senior vice president at Juju.com and Emissary.ai. “Emissary has been gaining a lot of traction with job boards, staffing firms, and employers. We plan to increase our marketing efforts and conference sponsorships soon.”
So, goodbye Glidepath, hello Emissary, I guess.
Rolled out at this year’s Direct Employers annual meeting, Emissary looks a whole lot like TextRecruit, Canvas, and Paradox. To date, specifics of the solution are sparse, but the solution offers 1-to-1 texting, traditional text campaigns, text retargeting, and chat by text.
For its sake, I hope it has better luck with the new business than it did the old one.