Global: the latest job board news from China, Australia, and beyond

It’s that time again – time to take a look at what’s going on in the global world of job boards. And I do mean global – as you’ll see, much of the activity has been happening outside of North America. Let’s get started:

• JobAndTalent lands some big money: Recruitment startup Jobandtalent, which uses linguistic analysis to alert candidates to jobs they might otherwise have missed, has topped up its Series A funding round with another $25 million — bringing the total to $39 million. The company – which is based in Spain – has 3.7 million users and is planning to enter the U.S. market soon.
• Connectifier raises cash: Connectifier announced that they secured a series A round, bringing their funding total to $6 million. The site creates candidate profiles from information gathered from anywhere people gather online – in other words, a ‘people aggregator’.
• Adzuna gets what it wants: Adzuna, the U.K.-based aggregator, successfully raised its crowdfunding target of £1.5 million pounds ($2.3 million U.S.) only three weeks after launching the fund-raising round. Impressive, and an interesting funding model for a recruiting site.
• AI and the job board: Gradberry, a recruiting platform that counts 3,000 engineers as users, is launching TARA, an artificial intelligence engine that scans candidates’ code and shortlists worthy ones automatically. The product, which stands for Talent Acquisition and Recruiting Automation, has made close to 800 recommendations in the first three weeks of this month. Yet another attempt at matching – will this one work?
• Tindr for jobs?: Switch, a job search app, has just announced a new investor in the form of Marker VC, closing out their seed round at $2 million. It lets users search anonymously for jobs through an algorithmic matching process and a UI similar to Tinder. Now, where have I heard this before?
• More Tindr for jobs: Navent, a leading real estate and jobs classifieds operating in 10 Latin American countries, has release Ubit Propuestas IT, a ‘Tindr-like’ app for IT job seekers. Job seekers and recruiters need to agree they like each other in order to have a “match”.
•  Zhaopin has strong Q3: Chinese job board Zhaopin Ltd. said it made $51.2 million in Q3. The site focuses on the SMB sector in China.
• 51Jobs, LinkedIn, and the Chinese recruitment market: The largest job board in China is 51Jobs.com, and in order to stay #1, they have launched the beta version of 51JingYing.com, a job-search platform that targets the higher end of the recruitment spectrum. Perhaps this was in reaction to LinkedIn – their revenue from its Asia-Pacific division grew by 64 percent in the third quarter, faster than from its operations in any other part of the world.
• A new job board for spies: The National Security Agency (NSA) is building its own jobs website. The site will serve as a hiring hub for America’s intelligence agencies; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency will hire through the as-of-yet unnamed site as well. The site, which will launch this fall, is aimed primarily at ex-intelligence agency employees now working in private industry or academia.
• SEEK moves into job placement: Australian job board SEEK has launched a ­premium placements strategy that it believes will eventually deliver a double-digit boost to ­revenues. The premium talent search product was quietly trialled with recruitment firms for six months before it was moved into a full product in the past two months.
• Investors want Dice to sell: Shareholders in DHI Group Inc., which operates Dice and other job boards, sent a letter to Chairman Peter Ezersky stating they strongly believe that a sale of the company is the best way to maximize value for shareholders. he letter cited the gap between the company’s current market price and its private market valuation as well as operational challenges the company has had under its current management team. In other DHI news, it announced that it has rebranded the UK site The IT Job Board to Dice.
• CareerBuilder makes it official: CareerBuilder has been acquiring and expanding its recruitment offerings for years. Now it has  officially 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.
• CareerOne set for an overhaul: Private education company ­Acquire Learning, chaired by former Australian Football League chief executive Andrew Demetriou, has bought a controlling interest in one of Australia’s largest job websites, Career­One, which it will relaunch early next month. CareerOne’s chief executive Ben Foote, who succeeded Karen Lawson at the end of March, said the website would relaunch to focus on matching candidates with companies, with the current approach used by all major job boards “out of date”.

Well, enough of Tindr and matching for this month. We’ll see what the coming weeks bring!