Bill Kutik, co-chair of the upcoming HR Technology conference, posted this morning about Kenexa’s “merger” announcement with Salary.com.
Kenexa’s Chief Executive Officer, Rudy Karsan, says that the acquisition will round out his compensation management offering. I suppose that means his sales people will be able to sell the Salary.com offering to its client base. But sharing accounts and commissions among sales people can be a big problem. Sales people cooperate with one another about as well as Tom and Jerry.
There’s another angle on this which is that separately developed technologies don’t mix. That’s why we should never call them mergers.
Finally, these things are invariably about money. Jason Corsello tweeted that Kenexa is paying too much ($80 million), and I’d agree if not for the excessive pricing of virtual all public equities. In fact, Kenexa itself has a market cap of $250 million despite a sharply declining revenue stream and years of losses totaling more than $100 million.
But for many employees of either company I suspect this will not be seen as a merger but rather a closing of various redundant departments. Time to update that resume.
