PartyGaming is advertising for a new Head of Product, further suggestion that the protracted merger between Party and Bwin has prompted an exodus of top talent from both companies, just as we predicted. For the record, it wasn’t a very difficult prediction. It only makes sense that the industry’s biggest merger would also be its messiest.
Also for the record, we believe that once the marriage is consummated, the new Pwin entity will still be a great company and an industry leader. But studies have overwhelmingly concluded that this type of mega-merger (a) fails to boost shareholder value; (b) allows more focused companies to gain market share; and (c) produces a bumper crop of talent and trade secrets that the rest of the industry is only too eager to harvest.
As the company he works for is one of the few in this sector that are aggressively recruiting at the moment (see here, here and here) we thought we’d ask Bodog Europe’s CTO AJ Thompson (who himself was recruited by the company back in June) as to the type of talent he’s seeing exiting the Party/Bwin brouhaha.
“With two new European offices to fill, it feels like being a kid in a candy store. It’s certainly refreshing to have such an explosion of quality candidates in the marketplace — quite a change from the bad old days when I had to physically walk developers to a betting shop and write out an accumulator for them!
“Our view at Bodog strongly focuses on experience being the key — whether it was a good experience or a bad one. In fact, people who have seen it done wrong in the past are far easier to drive it the right way in the future. I had a recent candidate say to me ‘I don’t fit in well with a corporate structure’ and I had to say – No worries, Bodog is not like any corporate structure you could ever imagine. We nurture free-thinking and we’ll cut through red-tape whenever we need to.
“If possible, I’d like the PartyGaming execs who have already made it to the exits, as well as those who may have yet to pack their bags, to consider the following question: If you had an open budget and full support of a global brand – where would you be looking? Whether your expert area is scaling, ecoms, UI or mobile, talk to us!”
There you have it, Party people. Act now and your grinning mug could end up in one of these types of announcements, instead of on the side of a milk carton.
