Facebook, Dice, LinkedIn, and more money: the online recruiting news roundup

Winter is fading (kind of) and plenty has happened during the past month and a half. So pull out your t-shirts and sandals, and let’s take a look at the latest in the online recruiting and job board world!:

• Surprise! Facebook is going after LinkedIn’s advertisers: Facebook is planning to allow advertisers to start targeting users based upon their employer and job title starting later this year, according to a recent blog post. The system, currently being tested and slated to roll out in March, targets job recruitment marketers. Why am I not surprised?
• Dice’s Q4 revenues are up 11%: The company’s fourth-quarter revenue grew to $58.4 million, an 11 percent improvement over the same quarter in 2012 and more than $4 million ahead of Wall Street’s expected $53.8  million. Some of this was due to the acquisition of OnTarget Jobs and the IT Job Board. Nice numbers for the niche player.
• Indeed wins the traffic competition: Indeed has taken the top spot for Career Resources category traffic in the US according to 2013 year-end desktop data released by comScore. Indeed showed a 21% year-over-year increase in unique monthly visitors while others in the Career Resources category showed sharp declines in 2013, including Careerbuilder.com (-26%), Monster.com (-36%), and SimplyHired.com (-17%). In other news, Indeed takes a page from CareerBuilder’s book and dives into big data.
• CareerBuilder sees revenue growth: Dice wasn’t the only publicly-held job board with good news – CareerBuilder saw revenue growth of 7.3% in Q4 2013. Gannett was happy, no doubt.
• Identified is acquired: After releasing earnings, Workday announced that it acquired Identified, a company that offered predictive analytics human resources software. Part of the company’s secret sauce was its patent-pending, artificial intelligence technology called “SYMAN,” which aims to organize the masses of disparate, incoherent professional data that lives in social media profiles in order to identify new insights into the job market.
• Monster buys Gozaik, TalentBin: In a move that surprised observers, Monster announced it bought recruiting startups TalentBin and Gozaik. The terms were not disclosed, but whatever the deal, it isn’t large enough to trigger a disclosure filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Smart moves.
• RegionalHelpWanted goes private: Eric Straus, who was both CEO and president of RegionalHelpWanted.com 2000 through 2008 has returned to its fold this month. According to Inside Radio, Strauss has bought back the firm from OnTargetJobs, its owner since 2008.The online jobs site works with radio stations by running ads (cut by Dick Orkin) in unsold inventory. Radio stations get a percentage of the revenue generated when advertisers post ads to the site in their market.
• Seek gets bigger: Australian job site Seek is buying the 78 percent of JobStreet Corp. that it did not own and it will merge JobStreet and JobsDB, in which it also owned a majority stake.The company is maintaining a compound annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent, on annual revenue of A$720.5 million ($651.3 U.S.) (on a unique “look-through” basis used by the company). Wow.
• Evenbase sells OilCareers: Evenbase, dmg media’s digital recruitment business, has sold its specialist recruitment job board, OilCareers, to Dice Holdings, Inc. for US$26m.
• TheLadders gets some bad news:  The United States District Court, Southern District of New York, ruled this past week that a consumer class- action lawsuit may proceed against high-income job-search site TheLadders. In the complaint for breach of contract and deceptive acts or practices plaintiffs alleged that they paid for resume services and job-listing access that TheLadders did not deliver. They also said that TheLadders.com was deceptively advertising. Ok, let’s see where this goes.

Whew! Makes you wonder what spring (and Facebook) will bring, eh?

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