CareerBeacon’s purchase of Toronto’s Ruutly, the Moncton recruitment company’s second acquisition this year, was aimed at consolidating pieces of technology that work better as a software suite than as individual tools, according to the heads of both companies.

Ruutly, founded in 2016 and led by CEO Ryan Porter, allows companies to show prospective employees job postings tailored to their interests, such as by automatically displaying an ad’s contents in the viewer’s own language. Porter said the CareerBeacon deal was aimed at giving Ruutly access to a job listings ecosystem where the system could be deployed at scale.

“When we started working on Ruutly … it became clear pretty quickly that we were going to need to either build an ecosystem or be part of an ecosystem on a larger level,” he said in an interview.

“When we came out here to New Brunswick and started talking with Yves (Boudreau, CareerBeacon CEO), it really opened the door in my brain to understanding what being part of an ecosystem could actually look like.”

Co-founders Yves Boudreau and Benoit Bourque started CareerBeacon in 2014 to make backend software for online jobs boards. The company was originally called Qimple, but has since undergone two rebrandings, with the latest having been to adopt the name of another business it absorbed earlier this year.

The CareerBeacon acquisition, before which Boudreau and Bourque’s company was called Alongside, was paid for with the help of an $8 million capital raise comprised of 40 percent equity funding and a loan from TD Canada Trust. The original CareerBeacon was one of the largest jobs boards in Atlantic Canada.

Talks between Ruutly and what is now CareerBeacon started before the other merger, and the parties agreed on a deal in principle, but waited to finalize the buyout until Boudreau’s team had closed their other deals.

Boudreau added that from CareerBeacon’s perspective, Ruutly’s experience working with blue-chip clients like British pharmaceutical giant GSK, German industrial conglomerate Siemens and bookseller Indigo was a major part of what made the deal appealing.

“Ruutly fills a gap in helping employers tell their employer branding story in a meaningful way, in the most meaningful place, which is their job postings,” said Porter.

The company’s two employees, counting Porter, are moving to CareerBeacon and keeping their jobs, bringing the larger business’s total headcount to 22. Porter, in fact, began working at CareerBeacon before the deal was finalized to help ease the transition.

Ruutly will continue selling to its existing clients, but will also be integrated into job postings on CareerBeacon.

“We’re looking at all the good things that we’ve built through Alongside and porting that over to CareerBeacon,” said Boudreau. “The goal is to bring everything into a singular experience over time.

“That’s not something that’s going to happen overnight, but we’re hoping the process will be done by the end of next year.”