Buy buy sell sell!: news of the job board and recruitment marketing industry

January 15, 2019
JobBoardDoctor
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news roundup Welcome to 2019! This marks the JobBoardDoctor’s 10th year publishing news, opinions, and providing consulting services. It’s been fun – and I hope (occasionally) informative. Here’s to another 10 years! In the meantime, our industry continues forward. A survey came out this week saying that 41% of job seekers find their jobs on job boards – and 61% rely on job alerts. Food for thought! On to the news, which is all about buying and selling:

The Mom Project garners some cash: Chicago-based startup The Mom Project, a platform built to help female knowledge workers find jobs after pausing to raise kids, has picked up a Series A of $8 million that it plans to use to bring its job marketplace to more cities — it’s currently in Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco — and to expand the kinds of services it offers. This brings the total raised by The Mom Project to $11 million, and with 75,000 registered moms and 1,000 companies, including Procter & Gamble, BP, Miller Coors and AT&T, the startup claims it’s now the largest platform of its kind in the U.S. Interesting.
Jobbird returns to life: Vacancy website Jobbird.com, declared bankrupt last month, has been acquired by YoungCapital. The company sees the acquisition as an important strategic asset. It is not clear at this moment how many employees are involved in the transaction. Furthermore, no details about the restart are published. Will be curious to see when the reboot happens.
MatchinGood is sold: Tokyo-headquartered Zigexn Inc., which operates multiple auto, jobs and property sites, has acquired jobs-matching cloud system MatchinGood to strengthen its recruitment business segment. While the acquisition price is undisclosed, Zigexn bought all the principal shares (1,099) of MatchinGood, making it a subsidiary. MatchinGood is headquartered in Tokyo and provides SaaS (software-as-a-service) matching to recruiters and temporary staffing companies. It has 260 clients. Congrats!
Changes at Crowded?: According to ERE scribe Joel Cheesman, a number of executives at the top of Crowded have either resigned or have been fired. The head of sales has left, but co-founder Joe Rubin still has Crowded as a present job on his LinkedIn profile; the other co-founder’s profile, Howie Schwartz, shows an exit date of December 2018. Interesting times.
Koru is sold: Seattle startup Koru launched in 2014 as a “bootcamp” platform that helped both employers find top entry level talent and graduates land jobs. It pivoted in 2016, focusing instead on selling predictive hiring enterprise software. Capp & Co., a London-based company that assesses talent, bought Koru’s predictive hiring technology. Entangled Group, a Bay Area-based incubator of education technology startups, acquired Koru’s original bootcamp platform. Lots of selling thus far this year!
Stepstone acquires Studydrive: Founded in 2013, the Cologne-based e-learning platform Studydrive allows more than 700k students from 100 universities from Germany, Austria and Switzerland to share their learning materials and lecture notes, and helps students find jobs and internships once they’re finished with their studies. Now, the Berlin-based recruitment company StepStone has taken over Studydrive. The amount of the deal has not been disclosed.
Outmatch acquires Wepow: OutMatch, a talent assessment technology provider, acquired video interviewing solutions provider Wepow. The transaction closed Dec. 31; terms were not disclosed. Wepow will maintain its offices and employees in Cupertino, Calif., and continue to serve clients while the two firms also pursue strategic opportunities to integrate the solutions each provides. Initially, Wepow will keep its name and overall brand. Over time, as Wepow’s video platform integrates into the OutMatch platform, the two brands will operate under the OutMatch brand name. Lots of acquisitions going on.
OLX buys Aasaanjobs: Naspers-backed classifieds portal OLX has acquired online hiring marketplace Aasaanjobs Pvt. Ltd for an undisclosed amount, the companies said in a statement. In June last year, Aasaanjobs had acquired mHire, a Noida-based recruitment marketplace focused on skilled and semi-skilled, blue- and grey-collar jobs. Yet another move by OLX.