The latest and great news in the job board and online recruiting world: Monster, TheLadders, Gild, and more

Things have been happening in our neck of the industry, and it’s about time I ran them down. And yes, theoretically it’s almost spring, although you’d never know it from the snowfall we had today! So with further ado, the news that is:

• Domains never sleep: Both CareerBuilder and TaxTalent picked up some new domains – JobsInMotion.com and TaxBytes.com, respectively. Interesting.
• Monster sells ChinaHR: Monster officials announced the sale of most of its stake in ChinaHR, and said the company had pulled out of Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. In related news, revenue was up, but profit was down.
• Is TheLadders a scam?: Candidate-pay site TheLadders is being sued in a New York federal court on allegations that the company promises users access to exclusive high-paying jobs that don’t actually exist. The site built its business by offering ‘only $100K jobs’ – a claim it has since given up.
• Indeed is the most trafficked job site: comScore said that 17.3 million visitors descended on Indeed during January 2013, making it the top employment site (although if LinkedIn were classified as an employment site, it would be the top dog).
• New Facebook-centric recruiting service launches: The Zurich-based online recruitment firm Silp has signed a strategic partnership with x28, another Swiss recruitment technology firm. Silp has job seekers ‘opt-in’; then it extracts relevant info from the job seeker’s Facebook profile, combining it with other information from linked services such as Twitter, GitHub and About.me. Silp claims to have had a million people sign up within its first three weeks.
• Is LinkedIn going to buy SilkRoad?: LinkedIn is making lots of money, which of course keeps its investors happy – but with great revenues comes an even greater demand for more revenue. Rick Summer with Morningstar thinks that SilkRoad would be a smart acquisition in 2013. Other possible candidates include Monster (natch), Viadeo, and Quora.
• Gild gets some more gold: Gild just completed its Series A financing totaling $8 million. Gild scours the web for information on developers, including their public code and contributions to developer forums, and then utilizes patent-pending algorithms to score the skills of the millions of developers it finds. Very interesting.
• Some Europeans job boards are growing fast: eQuest reported a unique list of European job boards showing extraordinary growth between 2011 and 2012. These included: Jobup.ch,  Jobs.ch,  JobIndex,  Catererglobal,  Kariyer.net, and FinnJobb.
• Monster gets accessible: The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) reported that as a result of an agreement between Monster Worldwide, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office and NFB, Monster will soon be the first in its industry with a fully accessible website. Monster is in the process of making its desktop and mobile websites fully and equally accessible and will have its mobile applications accessible within two years.
• LinkedIn evades a class action suit: Any damage done to LinkedIn users over the massive June 2012 data breach was abstract, not actual, a US judge ruled. Thus did a $5 million class-action lawsuit against the networking site get dismissed, before the case ever breathed the air of a court trial.
• CareerBuilder offers new employer tool: Does your job ad suck? CareerBuilder’s new tool can tell you by providing metrics on how it does compared to similar ads. Great idea.

Wow! Wonder what’s brewing next?

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