Fizbiz, AllyO, and Karat: news of the recruitment marketing industry

Flooding, storms, wind, and bugs – and that’s just within a few miles of my house! Yes, welcome to summer. Our industry is just as lively, with numerous companies landing funding, others launching new services, and a few acquisitions here and there. All this activity is a good sign, I think – so let’s take a look at what’s going on:

• Recruit revenue up:  Recruit Holdings reported revenue rose 4.3% to ¥580.3 billion (US$5.2 billion) in its fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31. The fastest growth took place in the Tokyo-based company’s “HR Technology” segment, which includes Indeed and Glassdoor. Revenue was up 45.4% in this segment during the quarter. Revenue growth within the HR technology segment was mainly attributed to increased sponsored job advertising revenue from new and existing enterprise clients at Indeed and the contribution from Glassdoor, which Recruit acquired last June. Impressive. In other Recruit news, Indeed said that it will acquire Syft, an online recruiting platform for the hospitality, event and light industrial sectors in the UK.
• Professional Diversity Network revenue sags:  Professional Diversity Network reported that revenue fell 41.8% in the first quarter ended March 31. The company reported the decrease was mainly due to management’s “focus on reduction in sales and operations workforce as a means to improved efficiencies and operational effectiveness while rebranding the business.” Professional Diversity Network has operations in the US and China. Ouch.
• InfoEdge acquires Highorbit: Info Edge India Ltd, the Indian job board, reported revenue from operations for the third-quarter ended 31 March 2019 of INR 2.92 billion (USD 41.9 million), up 21.6% compared to the same period last year. The company said that it agreed to acquire Highorbit Careers Pvt. Ltd for INR 808.2 million (USD 11.5 million). The company owns job portals iimjobs.com which specialises in Banking & Finance, Consulting, Research & Analytics, Sales & Marketing, HR, IT and Operations roles, and hirist.com which specialises in IT roles. Interesting.
• Monster plays catch-up: Monster is putting its media dollars back into TV after a decade away, allocating between 10% and 20% of its media dollars back to traditional advertising. In 2018, Monster spent $12.9 million on media, per Kantar Media. “For the last decade, we got really enamored with lower-funnel advertising,” said CMO Jonathan Beamer. ““We took so long off of the upper funnel brand marketing that essentially we lost a generation.”  Better late than never, I guess.
• LinkedIn does stuff: After a two-year effort, LinkedIn said that it had integrated its jobs and hiring efforts. On the jobs front, new features include instant job alerts, a redesign of the Jobs home page, and more salary insights available to all users (including free users), with skills assessments coming soon. On the recruitment front, LinkedIn Jobs, Recruiter, and Pipeline Builder were integrated to create a more seamless way to manage the posting of ads, and the sourcing of candidates and other leads. Smart move. In other LinkedIn news, the company purchased Drawbridge, a well-funded San Francisco-area startup that uses artificial intelligence to learn more about customers and target audiences.
• Karat raises funds: Karat — which takes on the process of technical interviewing on behalf of clients like Citrix, Roblox, InVision and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative by connecting already-sourced candidates with live engineers to interview, test and evaluate the candidates for the next step of the recruitment process — has raised $28 million in funding. Karat, takes a slightly analogue approach to the problem of technical recruitment: it focuses specifically on pairing up human interviewers — themselves engineers — with the candidates, lists of which have been provided to Karat by the companies themselves. Very interesting.
• Fiverr is going public: Freelance marketplace Fiverr has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which is headquartered in Tel Aviv, is losing money — its net losses grew from $19.3 million in 2017 to $36.1 million in 2018. At the same time, revenue grew by nearly 45%, from $52.1 million to $75.5 million. Fiverr was founded in 2010 and, thanks in part to controversial marketing, is seen as a key player in the gig economy. It says it has facilitated more than 50 million transactions between 5.5 million buyers and 830,000 freelancers (who sell services like logo design, video creation and editing, website development and blog writing). Hmm.
• Personality-based job site launches:  London-based Talentful is taking a new approach to job searching. Its ‘Insightful’ culture matching platform algorithmically calculates the jobseeker’s personality type, to give one of eight personality archetypes, then connects the jobseeker to positions available on the market based on the results, showing the best-matched jobs and giving a personalised culture fit score out of 100 for each position. Will be interesting to see where this goes.
• SeekOut gets cash:  The Seattle-area startup SeekOut announced a $6 million investment round led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Mayfield. The company helps HR departments by using swaths of data to provide an AI-powered “360-degree profile” of potential candidates — particularly those that have sparse or no LinkedIn profiles, but may be qualified based on harder-to-find accolades. The company is an evolution of Nextio, a professional messaging service formerly known as Telo. SeekOut’s thesis is that developers and engineers often don’t promote their experience or work on a LinkedIn profile, but may do so in a place such as GitHub or in research papers and patents. Cool.
• AllyO lands some funding: AllyO, the maker of an artificial intelligence-power chatbot, today announced a $45 million series B funding round. Total funding at the company is now $64 million. The company plans to use the funding to expand its product and global presence and AI team. Congrats!
• Fizbuz launches: Fizbuz, a new platform for developers to build detailed professional profiles and connect with employers, has launched. Fizbuz CVs include specific information about the coding languages, libraries (a sort of reusable piece of code) and framework in a developers’ skill set. Users can share preferences for what sort of company, role, team and physical workplace they’re looking for. ” Fizbuz is like LinkedIn meets Bumble for developers,” says founder Carter Rabasa. OK.
• Google for Jobs goes to France: Google for Jobs is now available in France. The service has partnered with France’s leading jobs sites, including Pole Emploi, HelloWork, Figaro Classifieds, and others. It claims to have access to a pool of “several hundred thousand listings,” Google for Jobs announced without sharing much detail. And so they march on…

Well! A lot…but I suspect much more to come in the next month. Until then, enjoy your week!