Viadeo is sold, AI comes to job boards, and more: recruiting site news

January 17, 2017
JobBoardDoctor
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Latest News 1 It’s a new year and the recruitment marketing industry is humming along. I counted 21 job board acquisitions and mergers during 2016 – which makes me wonder what will happen in 2017 (yes, I’m expecting an economic slowdown, but I’ve been wrong before!). So let’s take a gander at what has happened since our last news roundup:

Fuzu expands in Africa: Finnish startup Fuzu, a mobile-first platform for career development, recruitment and learning, has received €1.8 million from FinnFund. The funding will go toward business development and expansion in emerging markets in Africa and Asia. Finns in Africa – sounds like the pitch for a sit-com, eh?
2016-17 Recruiting Site Global Trends Survey is released: Hey, it’s true! And a little data never hurt anyone, right?
Glassdoor introduces some new stuff: Glassdoor has added some new updates, including ‘Enhanced Profiles’ with audience-specific targeting, new display advertising solutions that showcase open jobs and (not surprisingly) a company’s employer brand. Audience targeting is available for customers of Glassdoor’s Enhanced Profile Select Package.
Housing for gig workers: Bootstrapping London-based startup GigRove is a matching platform for digital workers with itchy feet and startups with a spare room and pressing skills need. The basic idea is for a freelancer to swap their skills in exchange for a place to stay, so they get to bootstrap their travel, while their host gets help with whatever task they’re looking for. Or..selling your keystrokes for a roof over your head.
Russia doesn’t like LinkedIn: The U.S.-based website LinkedIn, a social network for business professionals, is going to be blocked in Russia after a court found the company guilty of violating a law on data storage. LinkedIn had been targeted under a law put in place by President Vladimir Putin in 2014 and came into force this year. And I’m sure it’s all about the storage, right?
Figaro buys Viadeo: The French social network and LinkedIn competitor Viadeo has been purchased for 1.5M Euros. This sounds like a fire sale.
Codementor raises some moolah: Codementor (incorporated as Peer Idea Inc.) has raised $1.6 million in seed funding to grow its online education business into a marketplace for elite freelance developers who are among the top-rated mentors on its site. The site will focus on enhancing its matching algorithms, which enable the platform to automatically identify available, qualified engineers and pair them with programmers seeking help, or companies seeking to engage them for a freelance project. Kind of StackOverflow-ish.
Jobs2Careers gets predictive: Jobs2Careers has opened its suite of tools to niche job sites, publications, associations, and other job boards. Their “On-Demand Talent” platform provides a suite of APIs enabling partners to classify, predict, post, report, and bill for jobs on a pay-per-click or pay-per-application basis. Interesting.
New site claims to be 1st AI-driven job board: WEMPLOY, a recruitment agency in southern Spain that focuses exclusively on the financial services sector, has launched its state-of-the-art new job board in Luxembourg. WEMPLOY’s algorithm uses autonomous learning techniques to identify potential matches between candidates and jobs, without relying solely on tags or textual content. It looks at indicators such as user response to different job offers – read/bookmark/apply – as well as the interaction between employers and different candidate profiles. Very interesting.
AWS moves into training and job placement: Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched re:Start, a portal for IT skills training, specifically in cloud computing, and job placement for young adults and military vets and their spouses, which Amazon has built in partnership with the UK’s Ministry of Defence, the Prince’s Trust, and QA Consulting. Initially, AWS said that it will offer work placements for 1,000 people via re:Start. Extremely interesting!