LinkedIn sues, Zip raises: news of the recruitment marketing world

Fall is in the air (at least in Iowa) but activity in the recruitment marketing space hasn’t slackened. If anything, it feels like things accelerate as we get closer to the winter holidays! So let’s see what’s happened lately:

• A more than slight price increase: ZipRecruiter, the job alert/aggregator/job posting service, has raised its posting prices. A package of 10 “slots,” or listings that can be swapped, used to cost $50 per month. As of September 1st, it rises to $249 — a 500 percent increase. Scott Garner, spokesman for ZipRecruiter, told the AIM Group: “It’s never an easy decision to raise prices, which is why we stuck with our original pricing structure for the first six years of the business…We’re proud that ZipRecruiter offers the best dollar-for-dollar value in the industry.” Ouch.
• LinkedIn sues and tests: LinkedIn  filed suit against 100 unnamed individuals for using bots to harvest user profiles from its website. The lawsuit is a preliminary step to revealing the identities of the scrapers — LinkedIn intends to ask the court to reveal the true identities behind the scrapers’ IP addresses — and a way to maintain its exclusive hold on users’ resumes. However, LinkedIn doesn’t want to block all scraping – it’s fine with the search engines doing it, for example. In other LI news, the company has launched a service called LinkedIn Placements to provide an online test for users and help place them in jobs. And for businesses, it’s launched LinkedIn Starter Pack to set up and run their profiles on the social platform.
• Portfolium raises money: Portfolium, an 18-person start-up based in San Diego has raised $6.6 million in a first round of venture capital funding, led by SJF Ventures. The company gives college students and recent grads a digital platform for highlighting their academic projects to prospective employers. Hmmm.
• EmpleoListo is sold: Assured Labor, a Latin American company focused on digital low-wage recruitment, announced that the company has sold its service in Mexico — EmpleoListo — to OCCMundial (part of publically traded SEEK Limited). Terms for the transaction were not disclosed.Launched in 2010, EmpleoListo has over 1.3 million job seekers and 45,000 employers on the platform. Interesting move by SEEK.
• Jobbio raises cash: The Irish job site Jobbio has raised a fresh €5 million in series A funding, which will be pumped into growing the company in its existing hubs in Dublin, London and New York. This new round of funding will also be dedicated towards an expansion into Canada and help bankroll the company’s plans to double its workforce over the next 12 months.
  Jobbio co-founder and chief executive Stephen Quinn said “We are not a jobs board, we are not a recruiter, we are not a professional social network – nor do we aspire to be. We are a careers marketplace that makes it easy to discover companies and apply for job opportunities.” I dunno, kind of sounds like a job board.
• Glints also raises cash: Glints, a career development portal for young people in Asia, has raised US$2 million in its latest round of funding. The site recently launched a new skills tree feature that shows a user the skill sets needed for his dream job, and finds the relevant opportunities and resources such as courses, internships and projects to acquire these skills. Interesting feature.
• Glassdoor buys Love Mondays: Glassdoor has acquired Love Mondays, an employer review, salary data and jobs site in Brazil. Love Mondays was launched in 2014 by co-founders Luciana Caletti, CEO; Dave Curran, COO; and Shane O’Grady, CTO, and has approximately 20 personnel in São Paulo. The company is venture-backed and has raised more than $2 million to date. This deal represents Glassdoor’s first acquisition outside the United States. Sounds like a smart move.
• Indeed targets SEEK:  Indeed.com now employs 100 people at its three-year-old Sydney office, and its Austin-based president Chris Hyams told The Australian Financial Review its “pay-per-click” model was resonating with job advertisers sick of the “pay-per-post” model of Seek.com. According to IBISWorld, Seek currently controls 84.1 per cent of Australia’s online recruitment services market. Indeed.com has relied on scraping ads from job boards to build much of the 3000-employee, $900 million-turnover business it has become. Many of the 120,000 Australian jobs it claims are listed on its local site at any one time are aggregated from classifieds portals, recruiter sites or even from photos taken of “help wanted” signs in shop windows, through an internal start-up called Job Spotter it seeded last year. SEEK’s Andrew Bassat said his company had decided not to work with Indeed or any other aggregator. “It would be stupidity for us to do that. Why would we enable an organisation that uses job boards to grow their own brand and then starts competing directly with them?” Indeed.
• Siri for recruiting?:  HiringSolved will soon unveil what it considers “Siri for recruiting,” an artificial intelligence assistant for recruiters. His name will be RAI, pronounced like the name Ray, and standing for “Recruiting Artificial Intelligence.”The company has been working on it for five years, and is still perfecting it. The idea is that the artificial intelligence will make you a better recruiter/sourcer, guiding you through questions that very experienced sourcers ask themselves in order to chop through a database and hone in on who they want.
• BookedOut is sold:  Mobile on-demand job marketplace Shiftgig acquired BookedOut, a Chicago-based start-up that matches workers with hourly gigs. The acquisition adds 10,000 more vetted workers to Shiftgig’s network. BookedOut focuses on “experiential marketing” workers – think product demonstrators, set-up crews, event managers and brand ambassadors. Shiftgig launched in 2013 as a job site for hourly workers. It pivoted last year to become “the Uber for the service industry,” screening, hiring and placing hourly workers itself.

I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? More coming soon!