Eightfold, LinkedIn, and 51Job: news of the recruitment marketing industry

June 29, 2021
JobBoardDoctor
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51Job It’s only been a few weeks since the last roundup, but there have been acquisitions, mergers, 51Job going private, and quarterly reports a-plenty! All this, plus Eightfold’s massive fund raise – so rather than blather on, let’s get to the news.

Eightfold AI raises $220M: Eightfold AI raised $220 million in Series E funding, and will use the investment to continue developing its Talent Intelligence Platform and expand its partner ecosystem. To date, the company has raised more than $410 million, more than $350 million of it coming during the last several months. Using deep learning AI, Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform helps organizations recruit, upskill and reskill their workforce. Impressive. Congrats!
ZoomInfo gets into recruiting: ZoomInfo has rolled out ZoomInfo Recruiter, a platform designed to help recruiting teams identify and connect with candidates. The platform provides agencies, recruiters and sourcers with data regarding work history and education, as well as information to help employers understand each candidate’s functional, management and technical experience. In addition, the platform offers preset filters that help users gather information in areas such as DEI. Sounds like competition.
Supreme Court gives LinkedIn another chance: The Supreme Court has given LinkedIn another chance to stop a rival company from scraping personal information from users’ public profiles, a practice LinkedIn says should be illegal but one that could have broad ramifications for internet researchers and archivists. LinkedIn lost its case against Hiq Labs in 2019 after the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the CFAA does not prohibit a company from scraping data that is publicly accessible on the internet. The Supreme Court said it would not take on the case, but instead ordered the appeal’s court to hear the case again in light of its recent ruling, which found that a person cannot violate the CFAA if they improperly access data on a computer they have permission to use. Very interesting.
51Job going private: 51Job is the latest Chinese company to go private. The Nasdaq-listed recruitment marketplace (ticker: JOBS) announced a definitive agreement and plan of merger with Garnet Faith Limited, an exempted company, to be taken private in a deal valued at $5.7 billion U.S. The deal, which is currently expected to close during the second half of 2021, will be one of the largest deals recorded for a recruitment marketplace business. In Q1 2021, 51Job recorded revenues of $136.6 million, up by 13.2% from the same quarter in 2020. However, net income dropped 72% year-on-year to $8.7 million in the first quarter of 2021, according to the company’s earnings results released on 25 June. Geez.
Beamery raises $138M: Beamery, which has built what it describes as a “talent operating system” — a way to manage sourcing, hiring and retaining of people, plus analyzing the bigger talent picture for an organization, a “talent graph” as Beamery calls it, in an all-in-one, end-to-end service — has raised $138 million, money that it plans to use to continue building out more technology, as well as growing its business, which has been expanding quickly and saw 337% revenue growth year over year in Q4. The company said it had a year-on-year increase of 462% in jobs posted across its customer base. Wow.
Talent Inc. acquires Dutch company: Talent Inc. the company that operates TopResume and TopCV, has acquired Imkey Holding B.V. , a global subscription-based platform for online resume-building. Based in the Netherlands, Imkey helps job seekers create resumes and CVs online through their builder platform on its global property, Resume.io, as well as its 10 additional localized sites. Interesting.
Info Edge profits drop: Info Edge India Ltd., the parent company of Naukri and 99Acres, saw revenues increase 8.8% quarter-on-quarter this year, but net profits are down 4.6%. Net profit for Q4 FY20-21 stands at $8.96 million, while the corresponding figure from the preceding quarter was $9.4 million. Info Edge’s primary revenue driver Naukri continued to recover, bringing in $26.7 million, up 4.8% quarter-on-quarter. More pandemic recovery?
Burning Glass and Emsi merge: Labor market analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies is merging with fellow labor market analytics provider Emsi. Investment firm KKR is making a follow-on investment in the combined company and Strada Education Network, Emsi’s current owner, will be exiting its investment. The combined company will be called Emsi Burning Glass and led by Burning Glass CEO Matt Sigelman. Congrats!
Canadian developer network raises cash: Commit announced its emergence from private-beta with an oversubscribed funding round of $6M. The professional network is designed to support Canadian developers who are passionate about building early-stage software. The company already has a roster of 50+ startups that want to work with Commit Engineers. The funds will be used to 10x the number of Engineers on the platform in the next 12 months. Intriguing.
Gloat raises $57M: Gloat, which has built an AI-based platform that it sells to organizations to power their internal job boards, has picked up $57 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue business development, as well as to continue adding more features to its own platform. The Tel Aviv-based startup has raised $92 million to date. The company’s central premise is to build a job board tool that it sells to bigger enterprises — the kind that employ thousands of people and already have job boards — so that they can better hold on to talent rather than losing it to others because they — the employee and the employer — haven’t found the right role for a particular person who wants to switch gears. Very intriguing.
Pole-Emploi suffers data leak: Pole-Emploi.fr, the state-owned job board in France, has found personal data of its 120,000 users leaked due to ‘human actions’, after an initial investigation in collaboration with the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems. Personal data of job-seekers was put on sale as a file on the hackers’ forum for approximately $1,000, according to tech experts who also shared the forum’s screenshot on Twitter. Pole Emploi has around 50,000 recruiting agents for 6.6 million registered job seekers. Ouch.
HireLifeScience is acquired: Aequor Technologies LLC acquired HireLifeScience.com, a life sciences-focused jobs website based in Roosevelt, New Jersey. Aequor aims to expand its growth in the life sciences space. Aequor was founded in 1998 and has a US corporate headquarters in Piscataway, New Jersey. It provides staffing in IT and healthcare among other services. Congrats!
Axios Local adding job boards: Axios Local, a local-news-and-more product from the digital news company Axios, is expanding two ways — into more cities, and with new local job boards. The company operates one job board, in Charlotte, N.C., its flagship Local site. The company, which now operates Axios Local in six U.S. cities, is hiring for eight more and hopes to expand to 50 cities next year. Interesting. Well, not really.