February 2025: Massive Shake Ups: Layoffs, Acquisitions and People Moves

Happy February, Job Board Doctor friends! I hope you’re all busy planning a romantic Valentine’s celebration—or maybe a fun Gal-(or Guy)-entine’s gathering. And no, this is definitely not a subtle reminder for my gorgeous husband (and favorite JBD contributor and reader). 😉

This week, Chad and I are packing up and getting ready to head back to the U.S. after spending the last few months in Europe. As we prep for our flight, it felt like a great time to catch up on all the industry news that’s been making waves in the talent acquisition world—layoffs, acquisitions and lots of people moves to start out the month of love.

Let’s do this.

Layoffs

Workday to Lay Off 8.5% of Workforce

On February 5th, Workday announced it’s cutting 1,750 jobs as it shifts focus to AI development and implementation while also expanding services outside of the United States.

In an employee memo, CEO Carl Eschenbach wrote, “As we start our new fiscal year, we’re at a pivotal moment. Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday.”

While there was not information available to the timing of the layoffs, US based employees will be provided a minimum 12 weeks of severance pay with more pay available for more tenured employees.

Fast Company’s review of the announcement notes that 2025 has already kicked off with nearly 11,000 tech employee layoffs as reported on layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi

Read more from Reuters and Fast Company

Unfortunately, tech layoffs are not the only ones we are learning about this week, as the fallout from the revocation of  Executive Order 11246, which I covered last week, has resulted in major disruptions in the lives of people working in and around the federal contractor compliance space. For example, former employees of DCI Consulting announced they had been furloughed late last week.

People Moves

Big shake ups in the UK job board world!

Former Managing Director of Indeed UK, Bill Richards, is now Commercial Director at Reed.co.uk. He’ll be working alongside (but certainly not under?) Martin Warnes.

Warnes stepped in a couple of months ago following the departure of Simon Wingate. Wingate a 14-year veteran of Reed, who spent 3 1/2 years in the Managing Director role, launched his own consulting firm, SJW Consulting, in December.

More leadership changes:

Lauri Koop is out as CEO of Aimwel with COO Dennis Van Allemeersch stepping into lead. Koop wrote an epilogue of his 6 years at the helm following the announcement on LinkedIn.  Van Allemeersch also weighs in and all seems to be transitioning smoothly.

A fond thanks to Lauri who has always been a great supporter to the Job Board Doctor and a sounding board for me as I stepped into Jeff’s shoes.

From VerJobs to College Recruiter, Ben Groves is joining the College Recruiter team. Groves, in his announcement, wrote he will be expanding the partnership network in his new role.

Acquisitions

Paradox acquires Eqtble

Paradox is this week’s big winner with both an acquisition and a massive call out on CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer.

On Thursday, Paradox acquired people analytics platform Eqtble.

In the press release, Paradox CEO Adam Godson gives us clear insight to the thinking behind the buy. “AI is the future of talent acquisition – and the foundation of useful AI is high quality data, often connected from different sources that helps our clients solve real business challenges.”

Beyond the opportunity to access and visualize even more data, the acquisition certainly has to sweeten the pot for any potential Paradox buyers. The question is – how long will Paradox’s C-Suite continue to play coy to possible buyers?

How does it get better for Paradox? Well, Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright praises the quite frankly incredible results Chipotle and their Paradox “Ava-cado” have achieved and Cramer can’t believe what he is hearing.

After watching, it is completely understandable when Paradox CMO, Josh Zywien‘s LinkedIn post says exactly what every CEO is thinking – This is the dream. 

Other acquisition headlines

• Stepstone sells Universum (employment branding agency) to private equity group Dubag
• U.K. classified site Gumtree acquired by 58.com

Funding News

• SquarePeg lands $3.5M in seed funding to expand its candidate evaluation platform.
• FinalRound AI closes $6.88M in seed funding to support job seekers on their career journey. News for Final Round AI competitors EarnBetter and TealHQ to keep them on their toes.

Long Read

I have seen a growing number of posts in the last two weeks regarding job search activity and results in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT vs Google Search.

Many of you are wondering where the future of search is going. We are starting to see some small, but notable shifts. Friend of the Doc, Alexander Chukovski  shared his thoughts – How do you get your job board to rank in LLMs and AI search engines? (Long read – but worth it!)

Reality Check

🚨 We’re seeing and hearing of seriously delayed payments from multiple programmatic vendors to their job board partners and some others are even pulling out of the space entirely. When 45-day net payment terms stretch past 60 days late, that’s a red flag. Is your team sending email after unresponded email? I want to know more – ping me here.

Coming Up Next Week

We’ll be keeping an eye on U.S. labor market data for January and Q4 revisions. Stay tuned!