Facebook gets sued, Bayt gets AI, and more: news of the recruitment marketing industry

So it’s the end of the summer and not much is going on in recruitment marketing, except a new CEO at CareerBuilder and an UpWork IPO and…well, maybe there are a few things going on! Let’s take a look at the latest:

• Bayt gets AI: Middle East job board Bayt.com has launched a series of AI-based features and enhancements for the Mena region. One of these features is an AI-powered, three-tier system for job recommendations. Another feature is collaborative job recommendations, which studies job seeker groups of overlapping career interests and qualifications and makes suggestions accordingly. The site reaches 33 million job seekers and 40,000 employers. AI everywhere!
• Dice launches new service: Dice has launched a new platform called TalentSearch that utilizes AI and machine learning to help recruiters source and engage talent. The platform allows recruiters to input a job description or ideal resume to return relevant matches. In other DHI news, the company transferred a majority ownership of Rigzone to the site’s management team; DHI will maintain a minority position. Never a dull moment!
• RegionsJob gets a new brand:  Following the acquisition of jobs aggregator JobiJoba in July, the French online recruitment group RegionsJob has made a decision to rebrand into HelloWork and invest €30 million ($35 million U.S.) in acquisitions. The company say they want to become a major player in Europe. The site currently employs 250 people. Sounds like they’ll be hiring more soon.
• ResumeRabbit is sold: Talent Inc. announced the acquisition of the assets of eDirect Publishing Inc. and their ResumeRabbit product, a service that instantly posts a job seeker’s resume to dozens of job boards using a single registration form. As a software service launched in 2000, ResumeRabbit has provided resume-distribution services to more than 650,000 job seekers, performing over 40 million resume postings on their behalf. Congrats to all parties involved!
• CareerBuilder gets a new CEO and some AR:  Former president and COO Irina Novoselsky will take over as CEO at CareerBuilder; Matt Ferguson leaves after 14 years at the helm. Also, the job board has added augmented reality (AR) to its ‘mobile experience’ – basically, a job seeker can see job opportunities nearby via ‘information bubbles’. Hmm.
• JobToday raises $16 million: JobToday, a mobile-focused casual job marketplace headquartered in Luxembourg, has raised $16 million from 14W in a Series B round extension. The company operates in Spain and the UK; it plans to use the majority of the cash to increase its presence on the British market, where the looming Brexit is supposedly creating a gap between supply and demand. The startup stated that the overall volume of applications in the UK has grown by 46 percent year-on-year, while the number of applications per candidate increased by 32 percent. Very interesting.
• Zinc brings blockchain to the UK:  Zinc, a UK based start-up, has launched its blockchain based hiring software, which promises to eliminate inefficiencies associated with recruitment within the technology sector. The Zinc ecosystem verifies a candidate’s information on the blockchain and allows workers to securely store it in a distributed network. Kinda sounds familiar.
• Facebook gets sued: The American Civil Liberties Union filed charges against Facebook and 10 employers for gender discrimination claiming job ads on Facebook target male users but exclude female users. The charges claim Facebook delivers job ads selectively based on age and sex categories that employers choose, and that Facebook earns revenue from placing job ads that exclude women and older workers. Could have some interesting implications for the industry.
• UpWork plans an IPO:  Upwork — a marketplace connecting 375,000 freelance developers, writers, marketers and others  with close to half a million clients — announced a plan to list on the Nasdaq exchange to trade under the ticker UPWK, filing an S-1 form with the SEC with initial financials and other details about the company. In the 12 months that ended in June 2018, Upwork made $228 million in revenues on Gross Services Value (GSV: the total amount of overall service work ‘purchased’ on its platform) of $1.56 billion. Sales are currently growing at around 20 percent. The company, however, operates at a net loss, most recently posting $7.1 million for the six months ending June 2018. Very interesting.

Wow. Litigation, IPOs, new CEOs, and more money. Just another ho-hum month in our industry, eh? Well, I’ll be back in a few weeks with more news. In the meantime, don’t get bored!

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