Cash, IPOs, and purchases: news of the recruitment marketing industry

As we slip (drift? fall?) into fall, the recruitment marketing industry continues to grow and develop. Speaking of – have you taken the 2017-18 Recruiting Trends survey? No? Do it now! Ok, let’s get on to the news:

• Recruit is doing stuff: Recruit, parent company of Indeed (and lots of other sites) saw its revenue rise 20% during its fiscal Q1. It has also just invested $3M in 51Job, the Chinese staffing and job board company. The forecast for Q2 is – unsurprisingly – more growth.
• MyLittleJob raises money:  Mylittlejob, a German-based matching site for employers and college students, just closed a Series A funding round for 3.5Million Euros. The site, which launched in 2012,  uses algorithms that evaluate 250,000 college students in cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions with more than 5,000 individual data points per profile. Matching will never die.
• Stepstone buys Turijobs:  StepStone, part of Axel Springer SE , has purchased the Spanish job market Turijobs.com , which focuses on jobs in the Spanish tourism and hotel industry.  Turijobs.com was founded in Barcelona in 2007 and operates job exchanges in Spain, Portugal and Mexico. The company currently employs 25 people, counts around 800,000 registered users and offers more than 1,400 job advertisements every day.
• Wantedly planning to IPO: Japanese social recruiting startup Wantedly has successfully filed an application to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). Officially launched in 2012, Wantedly’s jobs platform aims to matches jobseekers to companies based on their social network. Interesting – haven’t seen many IPOs in our industry lately.
• LinkedIn opens a new office (and more): LinkedIn is opening a new office – its first in a decade – in Detroit. USA Today reports that this particular office will focus on selling LinkedIn products to assist businesses with marketing, hiring, and sales growth. In other LI news, a federal judge issued a huge setback for LinkedIn recently, ruling that LinkedIn can’t block the startup hiQ Labs from accessing public profile data. Finally – perhaps in an attempt to ‘be hip’ – LI is  launching a new feature to let any user upload a video to the site, via LinkedIn’s iOS or Android mobile app. Those folks just can’t sit still.
• PivotHealth does matching:  A new Seattle-based startup, Pivot Health, is aiming to solve healthcare industry hiring problems with a web-based hiring and job matching service. The company has launched the service in Washington state, with plans to expand to Oregon and California later this year.  The platform uses a machine learning algorithm to match job seekers with employers they would likely want to work for. The platform also offers career coaching and resume advice for job seekers. Kinda sounds familiar.
• Werk picks up some cash:  Werk, a job board platform focused on schedule flexibility, announced on August 4 that it closed its seed funding round, having raised $2.9 million. Female-run venture fund Rethink Impact led the round, joined by SoGal Ventures and Leah Busque.  Created by two women, Anna Auerbach and Annie Dean, the job board platform specifically targets companies that are looking to attract top female talent by offering flexibility. Interesting.
• ElevatedCareers is sold:  Boca-Raton startup Candidate.Guru, provider of a recruiting technology platform that matches job candidates to employers, acquired Elevated Careers by eHarmony.  Terms of the deal were now disclosed, but eHarmony will become a shareholder in the company. Dan Erickson, general manager and vice president of Elevated Careers, will join Candidate.Guru and be based in Los Angeles. I’ll be curious to see what Candidate.Guru does with the site. (FYI, Chad&Cheese did an interview on this.)
• Leap.ai guarantees interviews:  Leap.ai, which was founded 18 months ago and currently has 10 staff, maps out a range of data, including obvious areas like employment history, qualifications and skills and personal interests, career motivation and more, to assemble a more complete picture of a candidate’s career aspirations.  From there, the system matches job seekers with its clientele of companies that are looking to hire, including Dropbox, Uber and others. By asking candidates to name the two companies they aspire to work for, Leap.ai believes it can guarantee an interview with at least one. I’ll believe it when I see it.
• NetJobs is losing money:  NetJobs Group, the operator of 41 niche job sites in Sweden and Germany, is struggling with sagging revenue. In its Q2 earnings report, the company said the revenue was down ten percent to SEK 20 million in H1 of FY2017 (to end-June) from SEK 22.1 million in H1 2016. Well, someone has to lose money.
• Gigster lands some funding:  Gigster, a service that makes it easier for companies to hire a team of freelancers for a software project, announced that it raised $20 million in its series B funding round.  The company allows its clients to hire not just individual freelance engineers, but entire software teams composed of developers, product managers, and designers, all of whom have been vetted.
• McClatchey goes with Recruitology: McClatchy announced this week that it was replacing CareerBuilder with Recruitology, a white label solution for media companies. The deal was part of a recent announcement by McClatchy that it was selling off some real estate holdings to help improve the company’s financial footing. The deal will cover 30 job board markets. Very interesting.

OK, folks, that’s it for this round. See you again soon!

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