2015: the job board and online recruiting year in review

Another year has (almost) come and gone. Startups have started up, sites have been sold, money has gone into the market (and out of the market). In other words, a pretty good year for folks in our industry. So let’s put on our way-back hats and take a trip down memory lane before 2016 gets here. This is the 2015 year in review:

January

• Hired picks up $15M: Hired expands beyond computer science into sales and raised $15 million in Series B funding to help it rapidly expand on a global scale. This is not the last we’ll be hearing from them in 2015
• Glassdoor raises $70M: Glassdoor announced it has raised $70 million in new financing.
• Indeed doubles down on Europe: Indeed.com plans to double its workforce in Europe by the end of 2015 as part of a “substantial” recruitment drive.

February

• StackOverflow cranks up: StackOverflow, the Q & A site for developers, lands $40M in funding.
• LinkedIn had a very good year:  LinkedIn reported another winning quarter this afternoon, bringing in $643 million in the last three months of 2014. The quarter capped a go-go year for LinkedIn, which saw its 2014 revenue grow to $2.22 billion, a 45 percent increase  2013′s $1.53 billion.
• Monster’s numbers hurt by overseas activity:  The financial health of Monster Worldwide, the owner of Monster sites in North America, Europe and Asia, deteriorated further in FY2014 from FY2013.

March

• More ‘Tinder for Jobs’ news: There were a lot of ‘swipe and hire’ startups in 2015; one was Super, which picked up CrunchCommerce. Super was first launched in the middle of 2014 as a resume builder.
• LinkedIn limits API usage: LinkedIn restricts access to most of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to companies that have struck up partnerships with the social networking company.

April & May

• Rigzone and OilCareers Unite: Rigzone, a Dice Holdings, Inc. service completed the integration of OilCareers, a U.K. based oil and gas recruitment site and also a Dice Holdings, Inc. service, to form one globally-centralized online oil and gas talent base.
• LinkedIn buys stuff:  LinkedIn made a push into the area of anticipatory computing – predicting what information you need to know, when you need it. The company acquired and closed down Refresh.io, a startup and iOS app of the same name that surfaces insights about people in your networks right before you meet them. LinkedIn also spent $1.5 billion (yes, billion) to acquire Lynda.com,  the online learning company.
• CampusJob raised some serious moolah: CampusJob, which launched in 2014, raised $7.8M in Series A funding – bringing its total funding haul to $9.1M.
• eLance and oDesk rebrand:  The freelance supersite eLance/oDesk rebranded itself UpWork.
• Monster’s money and related news: Monster reported $183.7 in revenue for Q1, falling a bit short of investor expectations, with mixed signals elsewhere – bookings were up, but revenue dropped 4% year over year. However, Monster was able to claim bragging rights on sheer revenue size, topping Indeed, which earned $434 million last year to Monster’s $770 million.

June & July

• SEEK moves into job placement: Australian job board SEEK launched a ­premium placements strategy that it believes will eventually deliver a double-digit boost to ­revenues.
• CareerBuilder makes it official: CareerBuilder launched CareerBuilder1, a recruitment-management system for employers. The software suite integrates functions that are part of the entire recruitment cycle, from creating requisitions to job postings to organizing candidate data to creating standard and custom reports.
• Connectifier raises cash: Connectifier announced that they secured a series A round, bringing their funding total to $6 million.
• JobAndTalent lands some big money: Recruitment startup Jobandtalent, which uses linguistic analysis to alert candidates to jobs they might otherwise have missed, topped up its Series A funding round with another $25 million — bringing the total to $39 million. The Spain-based company has 3.7 million users and is planning to enter the U.S. market soon.

August

• CareerBuilder acquires TextKernel: CareerBuilder acquired Textkernel, a Netherlands-based company specializing in semantic recruitment technology for an undisclosed amount.
• Freelancer.com revenue rises: Freelancer Ltd., the operator of online staffing provider Freelancer.com, reported that revenue rose 40.8% in the first half of 2015 to AUS$16.8 million (US$12.8 million) despite a loss for the period of AUS$1.3 million (US$983,000).
• ReferralMob lands cash: Boston-based ReferralMob offers a website and mobile app that charges employers to access its  “mob” — a network of people who, if they successfully refer a candidate, receive large cash prizes that can be split between the new employee and the referrer. Investors were impressed enough to give them $2M in seed funding.

September

• Beyond gets into online learning: Beyond, the job board network, and Udemy, a marketplace for online learning, began a partnership to add Udemy’s online skills-based courses.
• A big job board in Russia:  HeadHunter (HH.ru), Russia’s leading jobs vertical, is the world’s third most-visited jobs site on desktop visits, as measured by audience stats site SimilarWeb.com. With almost 30 million desktop visits in July 2015, HeadHunter is now only behind global U.S. platform Indeed.com (in first) and France’s Pole-Emploi.fr globally in the recruitment segment.
• On-demand staffing for the sharing economy: Wonolo, a San Francisco startup with an app that matches workers with available temp positions, has based much of its growth on the booming ecommerce sector, especially fulfillment and delivery operations.

October & November:

• And from France, Clustree!:  French startup Clustree raised a new funding round of $2.9 million (€2.5 million) with Alven Capital and business angels. Clustree automagically finds the right person for the right position within big companies using big data.
• LinkedIn settles: LinkedIn announced that it agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over sending unwanted emails. The lawsuit revolves around LinkedIn’s Add Connections feature, which would send out connection requests to people in a user’s contact list who did not already have a LinkedIn account. It will pay at least $13 million into a fund to make payments to LinkedIn users who qualify for the suit.
• Monster Q3 revenue down: Monster’s Q3 2015 revenue of $167.1 Million was flat sequentially, and down 3% Year over Year. North American revenue dropped 4%.

Impressive? Yes – but I expect 2016 to be even more exciting!

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