The news that barely fits: job board and recruiting action

November 3, 2015
JobBoardDoctor
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At the recent IAEWS meeting, several of you came up and mentioned that you enjoyed these monthly news roundups. Thanks! They are actually pretty time consuming to put together, but I find them useful as a scorecard for where our industry is. A tip of the hat, by the way, to two key sources: TechCrunch and AIM Group. So without further ado, let’s get scribbling!:

Hired does some hiring: The tech recruiting site/agency Hired has moved their former CEO, Matt Matt Mickiewicz, to Chief Product Officer, and has promoted Mehul Patel to CEO. Patel said Hired’s revenue has been tripling year-over-year since it was founded in 2012 and is projected to reach a $100 million annualized run rate next year – which means it is giving Dice a run for its money.
Assured Labor raised big bucks: David Reich started Assured Labor in 2008 to make informal labor markets in Latin America faster and more transparent for low-skilled workers. It was a social enterprise meant to connect workers, who often had little more than a feature phone, to evaluate or sign up for work opportunities by text message. The company just closed another $6.75 million funding round led by existing investor, Capital Indigo, with participation from Mexico Ventures, Thayer Ventures and Promotora Social México.
CareerBuilder lays an egg?: CareerBuilder has a new logo – and the response seems to be unanimous…blech! Recruiters, web designers, logo experts, and business insiders all pointed to a distinctly ‘retro’ feel that was no doubt unintentional. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the new logo was created in house. In other CB news, they have launched the Talentstream Sourcing Platform enables recruiters to search candidates across their internal applicant tracking software, external job boards and professional networking databases through one interface. Smart move.
Stepstone in Sweden relaunches: Sweden’s Blocket launched a new site for Stepstone in Sweden, according to a media statement released by Blocket. The Schibsted-owned Blocket bought StepStone in Sweden early in 2014. StepStone operates as a complement to Blocket Jobb, the jobs vertical of general classifieds platform Blocket.se, the dominating general classifieds site in Sweden.
Indeed moves up in brand awareness: A fascinating article on the behind-the-scenes work that has moved Indeed’s unaided brand awareness from 10% to 51% over the past year. Check it out.
And from France, Clustree!: French startup Clustree has just raised a new funding round of $2.9 million (€2.5 million) with Alven Capital and business angels. Clustree automagically finds the right person for the right position within big companies using big data. Referrals are a key hiring source, but internal referrals have gotten less attention, so Clustree shows some promise.
Connectifier lands more cash: Connectifier announced that the company had closed a Series B round of funding in the amount of $6 million — bringing its total funding to date to $12 million. The company essentially crawls millions of pages of social networks and other sites that post public information from individuals, and about individuals, to build profiles of people, using a host of algorithms to sift out older pieces of info to give more emphasis to current information to improve accuracy.
TopEngineer launches: Talenetic, the latest startup of brothers Keith, Graham and Eric Potts, founders of Jobsite.co.uk, launched TopEngineer.com, an aggregator focused on matching engineers with relevant jobs around the world. This launch follows in the steps of Oilfinity.com, a jobs site is aimed at the global energy market. What’s next?
LinkedIn settles: LinkedIn announced that it has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over sending unwanted emails. The lawsuit revolves around LinkedIn’s Add Connections feature, which would send out connection requests to people in a user’s contact list who did not already have a LinkedIn account. It will pay at least $13 million into a fund to make payments to LinkedIn users who qualify for the suit. Seriously, guys, for LI, that’s chump change! In other LI news, they have launched Referrals, a way for companies to automate the process of tapping into their existing employee networks to hire new people. Also, LinkedIn’s Q3 2015 results were up in every category, including an impressive 37 percent increase in worldwide revenue to $780 million.
Monster Q3 revenue down: Monster’s Q3 2015 revenue of $167.1 Million was flat sequentially, and down 3% Year over Year. North American revenue dropped 4%. I guess there’s no way to make that sound positive.