2023: the job board year in review

Today we’re looking at 2023: the job board year in review. Why? Well, it was a heck of a year, to be honest. 2022 was a very strong year for employment and job boards, if you remember, and there was hope that the same would happen in 2023. Guess what? It didn’t. The first, second and even a good part of the third quarter was not great for many job boards – yet by the final quarter, things were looking up once again. Let’s dig into what happened, month by month:

• January: Beamery led the way, laying off a tenth of its staff. Axel Springer announced (again) a probably IPO for Stepstone. Recruit announced a big dividend – good news for the company, but this would not last, sadly.
• February: Madrid’s Jobandtalent achieved a 90% increase in annual revenue over 2022. However, LinkedIn showed a slowing in its revenue growth. DHI was feeling pretty good with an increase in 4th quarter year over year revenue of 17.8%. France’s Welcome To The Jungle raised a new $54 million (€50 million) Series C round. And Jooble launched a startup incubator.
• March: Recruit’s revenues fell on a U.S. dollar basis, and the company revised guidance for the coming year. ZipRecruiter made the inexplicable decision to partner with AntMan to promote their 1Click Apply. UpWork’s revenue jumped 18% year over year for the fourth quarter. France’s Freelance.com also saw revenues rise by 23%. And let us not forget Indeed’s bumbling rollout of CPA!
• April: Mitratech, a legal, compliance and HR software company, acquired Circa. Japan-based job site operator MyNavi acquired India-based HR intelligence company PeopleMatters and Tennavi-job.com. Indeed and Glassdoor laid off 15% of their workforce. Talent.com laid off 18% of their workforce. LinkedIn began testing AI-powered job postings. The U.S. government settled an employment discrimination complaint against DHI Group, a development that brings into question long-held liability protections that recruitment sites have enjoyed alongside other internet publishers.
• May: New legislation required that EU companies disclose information that makes it easier for employees to compare salaries and to expose existing gender pay gaps. LinkedIn revenue rose 10% in constant currency to more than $3.70 billion. DHI Group’s first-quarter revenue rose 12.5% year over year to $38.6 million. True, a global platform of talent management products and services based in Haddonfield, New Jersey, acquired Jopwell, a New York-based hiring platform for diversity students and early-to-mid-career professionals.
• June: Kaare Danielsen, the founder, CEO and majority owner of Denmark-based job board JobIndex, decided to delist the company from Nasdaq First North Growth Market Denmark. Twitter bought IT recruitment platform Laskie. Veritone, a publicly traded California enterprise company focused on artificial intelligence, announced plans to pay $52 million for Broadbean. China-based classifieds giant 58.Com planned to cut up to 14,000 jobs. Outsourced recruitment company Recruiter.com g0t a new CEO, a new name and a new strategic direction as an AI-focused hiring consultancy.
• July: Appcast acquired recruitment marketing firm Bayard Advertising. Indeed was “finalizing our plans for additional market expansion” after rolling out pay-for-performance in France, following launches in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.  Joonko, a hiring platform focused on DEI, was shut down after  Joonko’s board of directors said the company’s results had been manufactured, and much of what founder and CEO Ilit Raz reported to them “had no basis in reality.” France’s Monster.fr, which introduced pay for performance options in 2022, was now refining and promoting its PPA options as well.
• August: Revenue declined at Indeed, which saw paid job ads fall by 50%. Revenue rose 7% year over year in constant currency at LinkedIn in its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30. Randstad revenue fell 5% year over year on an organic basis in the 2nd quarter to €6.47 billion. DHI Group’s Q2 results show revenue was $38.5 million, up 4% year over year, while total bookings were $32.3 million, down 9% year over year.  Upwork’s Q2 revenue rose 7.5% year over year to $168.6 million, and gross margin improved.
• September: X, formerly Twitter, took the next step in its foray into the recruitment space, offering access to the beta version of its hiring service. Grupa Pracuj, the parent company of a number of Eastern European job board brands, reported consolidated revenue today for the second quarter of PLN 184.3 million (€41.2 million), an increase of 33.4%.  Info Edge India Ltd., the parent company of Naukri and 99Acres, posted INR5.8 billion ($70.4 million U.S.) for the three months ending June 30. French talent platform Freelance.com reported revenue of €210.9 million for the second quarter ended 30 June 2023, an increase of 5%.
• October:  Job advertisements in Australia plummeted by 20.5% year-on-year in August 2023, according to data from job board Seek.  Japan-based recruitment marketplace FindJob ceased operations after more than a quarter of a century. Berlin-based PowerUs, a career platform for skilled blue-collar workers such as electricians and plant mechanics, raised €24.0 million ($25.7 million U.S.).
• November: LinkedIn laid off approximately 668 people across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams. DHI Group reported third-quarter revenue fell 2.8% year over year to $37.4 million. EmploymentHero, an Australia-based provider of end-to-end HRTech services, raised A$263 million ($167 million U.S.). Hamburg-based Xing pivoted its business model from a professional social network to a job board.  Stepstone announced that it was laying off “roughly” 215 employees, about 5% of the company’s 4,200-strong workforce.
• December: Fiverr reported revenue growth of 12.1% for the third quarter of 2023 ended 30 September 2023. Revenue fell at Indeed and Glassdoor amid uncertain economic conditions, and the new pricing model at Indeed helped push down paid job ads; Indeed also cancelled their pay per application offering.  Third-quarter revenue at ZipRecruiter fell 31.4% to $155.6 million. Upwork reported third-quarter revenue rose 10.8% year over year. Revenue at Germany-based New Work SE, the parent company of job network Xing and employer rating portal Kununu, fell by 3.8% year on year (y-o-y) to €75.7 million ($80.8 million U.S.) in the three months to September 2023. Finally, in some symmetry to their January layoffs, Beamery shed 25 percent of its workforce.

Kind of a Dickensian tale, eh? The best of times, the worst of times – depending on which job board you were in our 2023: the job board year in review. Let’s see how 2024 plays out!

[Want to get Job Board Doctor posts via email? Subscribe here.].

[Check out the JobBoardGeek podcast archive!]