Looking for a job, use Wangwang?

Wangwang seems to finally begin expanding beyond the territory of Alibaba. Today, I noticed that a new feature called "Hire" quietly appeared on the sidebar of Taobao Wangwang: [Image].

Correspondingly, on the personal profile editing interface of 51job, there is now an additional option: [Image].

This collaboration between Wangwang and 51job has been rather low-key. The information available online about it is basically all from the same PR release, such as this one.

Although it has always existed within the Alibaba ecosystem as an instant messaging (IM) tool, Wangwang now has close to 15 million active users. To put it another way: in terms of numbers, it is approaching MSN, which is the second largest IM service domestically. (Data reference here, here)

It was common knowledge that Wangwang would eventually step out of Alibaba's own domain; the only unknowns were when this step would be taken and where the first move would lead. With the launch of Baidu Hi, one could imagine that Wangwang would accelerate this process. However, it was unexpected that Wangwang's first step would be into online recruitment.

The related reports mention several features that will be provided through the collaboration of these two companies...