Big Three online job board HotJobs has long touted its relationship with parent company Yahoo as one that generates growth and visibility.

That’s not the case in the Canadian market, however, where Yahoo dropped HotJobs in favor of Workopolis, Canada’s largest job board. A HotJobs spokeswoman would not provide comment.

Workopolis begins powering Yahoo’s job site in Canada this week. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

“We are very excited with our new relationship,” says Patrick Sullivan, president of Workopolis.

The job board, which also has a partnership with MSN and is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers and Gesca Ltd., believes it will now be able to reach 95 percent of Canadians who are on the Internet.

Sullivan says Workopolis would like to hammer out an agreement with HotJobs, whereby the Canadian job board sells spots for job openings in the United States. Workopolis had a similar agreement in place with CareerBuilder, which fizzled a year ago.

“We admire HotJobs,” Sullivan says. “Their endeavors with the newspaper industry in the U.S. will have a big pay off for them.”

The picture doesn’t look as promising in Canada, however, where Workopolis dominates the market. The company has listings for 60,000 jobs, which is three times the number of its closest competitor, Monster, and has been growing at a rate of 30 percent annually.

“It would be difficult to supplant us,” Sullivan notes.

“HotJobs probably wasn’t bringing much to Yahoo’s bottom line in Canada,” says Jim Townsend of Classified Intelligence. “Workopolis may have made more sense.”

Townsend notes that what is transpiring in Canada is isolated and unlikely to be repeated in the United States, where the job board is forging important intermedia partnerships with newspapers. In November, Yahoo joined a consortium of seven publishing giants, gaining classified advertising distribution online and across 38 states through a network of 176 newspapers.

The Canadian market has attracted several of HotJobs’ U.S. competitors, including Monster, which is the second-largest job board in Canada, and CareerBuilder, which partnered with Lycos Canada in November.

Canada’s online recruitment arena is valued at $80 million annually and could reach $110 million by 2008.

—Gina Ruiz