Stock market woes and Indeed highs: news of the online recruiting industry

As Valentine’s Day recedes in our rear view mirror, it’s time to take another look at what’s been going on in the industry over the past month. There has been the usual amount of ‘revolutionary’ new products and a bit of stock market heartburn. So without further ado, let’s see what’s up:

• Publicly traded job boards get pounded: Yes, it has been a bad few days for LinkedIn (down 43%), Monster (down 36%), and DHI (down 5%). What happened? Well, depending on who you talked to, it was the slowing economy, funky fundamentals, or something else entirely. Nonetheless – LinkedIn had a great Q4 and DHI aka Dice seems to be seeing growth with OpenWeb. We’ll see what’s next.
• Snagajob gets some moolah: Arlington, VA-based Snagajob announced a successful funding round of $100 million, led by New York-based Rho Acceleration, a division of Rho Capital Partners, and is joined by Washington, DC-based NewSpring Capital and the New York-based Invus Group. According to Snagajob’s official announcement, they will use the new capital to expand their product offerings and fund future acquisitions. I guess they’re getting serious.
• Job app for the hospitality crowd: JobToday, a Luxembourg-based startup, has secured $10 million in venture capital to fuel its continued expansion throughout Europe. The Tindr-like app is aimed at the retail and hospitality sectors.
• Money for Poached: Also in the hospitality sector:  Poached Jobs, a Portland, Ore.-based job board and hiring platform for bars and restaurants, has raised $2.25 million in funding, roughly two-thirds of a planned offering amount of $3.3 million. Poached Jobs operates in twelve markets: Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, New York, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Denver, San Francisco, L.A., Portland, and Seattle. However, the company hopes to move into many smaller cities in America. This sector is getting crowded!
• Hired gets French: Hired,  the previously tech-focused and now broadening job site, has acquired Paris-based Breaz, which connects tech and sales talent with local companies. As a result of the acquisition, Breaz’s four co-founders will join Hired. Interesting move.
• A diversity startup gets some cash: Jopwell, the Y-Combinator-backed diversity and hiring recruiting platform dedicated to helping blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans get jobs in tech, has raised a $3.25 million seed round from Magic Johnson Enterprises, Andreessen Horowitz, Kapor Capital, Omidyar Network, Valar Ventures and others to scale its operations and product capabilities. This round brings its total funding to more than $4.22 million. It picked up 40 new corporate customers in 2015.
• CareerBuilder gets into ‘right-sized’ training: CareerBuilder and Capella Education Company are partnering to offer a program called RightSkill^SM that aims to fill talent gaps for employers and help job seekers advance their careers. Set to launch this spring, the collaboration represents the first time that real-time labor data will be paired with competency-based education to design educational programs directly aligned with the needs of employers. The programs are designed to be completed in less than 90 days at low cost – money that will be refunded to the job seeker if they don’t find placement with an employer within 90 days of completion in the designated field. Very intriguing.
• Tyba launches Sourced:  Tyba has launched Sourced (or  ‘source{d}’ as they prefer to present it). Focused on recruitment and professional development for software developers, it scans code submitted to repositories on services such as GitHub and Bitbucket, and builds a database of the skills and experience of each coder. The company says it has analyzed more than 4.6 million developers across 14.4 million projects and 742 million code commits. Impressive.
• Plugin for SimplyHired: Pete Metz of SkipTheDrive has created a free WordPress plugin that displays jobs from SimplyHired’s partner solutions on a WP-based job board site. Take a look!
• ITJobMatch tackles 3 audiences: ITJobMatch, a tech job matching site in Corning, NY, has created a skills matching system that uses a comprehensive taxonomy of IT products and skills to connect job seekers with employers. The site focuses on job seekers, employers, and IT service companies. The tech space gets more crowded.
• Big growth from Indeed:  Japanese staffing giant Recruit Holdings Co. – parent company of Indeed – reported net sales of ¥1,139.4 billion (US$9.46 billion) for the nine months ended Dec. 31, an increase of 21.8% compared with ¥935.5 billion during the same period last year. But the mind-blowing stuff came from the HR media part of the company:  the overseas business (which includes Indeed) grew by 82.9% aided by favorable currency trends.

Well, ups and downs are part of our industry. We’ll see what happens next month. See you then!

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