Maki Responds, Adzuna Acquires, Indeed 2027
Happy Friday Job Board Doctor friends! What a week it has been.
What’s on tap this week? Three updates and a rumor.
- Maki People responds to the Doc.
- Dennis Van Allemeersch joins Jobiqo’s advisory board
- Adzuna lifts Joblift off the sales shelf
- Indeed 2027 commission plans are trickling out
MAKI PEOPLE RESPONDS, AND THE RECORD GETS UPDATED
Last week I published an article sharing my perspective on the Recruitics and Maki People integration. This week, something happened that almost never happens in this industry: Maki People responded. A four-page, point-by-point written reply, with CEO Maxime Legardez as the named contact and an offer to continue the conversation on the record.
Vendors usually respond to scrutiny with silence, a LinkedIn subtweet, or a quiet call to your sponsors. A documented rebuttal is what accountability is supposed to produce, so credit where credit is due before anything else.
Their response was provided as a draft, so I am not publishing it in full today. I have requested permission to publish the complete document, unedited, and if granted you will read every word. What I can and should do now is update the record where their response, and the documentation behind it, allows me to update and correct last week’s article.
Accountability only works if it cuts both ways.
Update one: the bias audits exist, and the auditor has a name. My piece, relying on an independent compliance directory and on Maki’s own product page as it existed on July 10, said Maki published no downloadable bias audit and named no independent auditor. That was wrong. Maki’s screening agents are audited annually under NYC Local Law 144 (NYC LL144) by Holistic AI, with the most recent audits of Mochi and Shiro completed March 23, 2026.
Maki shared the full signed Mochi report with me, all 25 pages, and I have read it. Maki acknowledged the reports were difficult to find on its own site and says it is fixing that, and in fact the Mochi product page has already been updated since July 10 to name the auditor and link to the summary of results.
Of course, I archived the original page. When a company provides documentation publicly within days of being questioned, that is the system working. Though I will gently note that findability is a strange thing for a defensibility product to struggle with. An audit nobody can locate defends exactly nobody.
Update two: race and ethnicity are tested. The “gender, age, and nationality” list I quoted described Maki People’s internal pre-ship testing only. The independent Holistic AI audit covers gender and race/ethnicity at both standalone and intersectional levels as required under the NYC LL144 regs.
Update three, confirmed rather than corrected: ISO 42001. Maki People confirms it does not hold the certification, describing it as a deliberate choice to prioritize EU AI Act conformity, with ISO 27001 in hand. Fair point.
All three updates have been made to the original article on the site, marked as such.
one more thing from their response, this one in the other direction.
On the central argument of last week’s article, that based on my knowledge, a scored pre-apply AI interview individually considers every candidate who completes it, and consideration is what creates applicants with recordkeeping and adverse impact obligations attached.
Remember: “Consideration” is one of the prongs that creates the applicants.
If you didn’t get a chance to read my thoughts last week, you can catch up here first.
Maki People’s response acknowledges this is a fair concern for covered U.S. federal contractors, places the compliance responsibility on the client side, and says the company is preparing customer guidance on the applicant-definition implications of pre-apply screening, while sharing what they believe also supports better defensibility.
Federal contractor buyers, read that however you like, but here is my translation: when the vendor tells you the exposure is yours, believe them, because they are right and it is.
What the response did not resolve, in my reading: whether any adverse impact testing has ever covered disability or veteran status, the two categories OFCCP still actively enforces; how content-only scoring squares with a product page that advertises evaluation of linguistic performance and communication; and what the human review of below-threshold candidates actually looks like in live deployments, in numbers rather than policy.
So this week I sent Maki a set of written follow-up questions covering:
- the audit’s data and design,
- the approach to the disability and veteran job seeker,
- the scoring definitions,
- the speech recognition layer,
- disability data governance,
- and the human review numbers, along with the request to publish their original response in full.
I have asked for answers by July 27, and Maki People’s CEO has already indicated a willingness to go on the record. Whatever comes back, and whatever doesn’t, you will read about it here. There is also a longer story inside those 25 audit pages that deserves its own issue, and it is coming.
One closing thought on the bigger picture, because it matters beyond one vendor. In three weeks this exchange has produced a public correction from me, a documentation fix from them, a signed audit report on the table, and a numbered list of questions for follow up.
That is more transparency than this industry typically generates in a year, and it happened because a vendor chose engagement over silence.
JOBIQO ADDS PROGRAMMATIC FIREPOWER TO ITS ADVISORY BOARD
Jobiqo announced on July 9 that Dennis Van Allemeersch has joined its advisory board. Van Allemeersch most recently ran Aimwel, the programmatic recruitment advertising platform built by DPG Media, and recently joined as CEO of Beslist.nl, the largest price comparison marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium. He joins Lou Goodman (formerly Monster) and Bernhard Deussner (formerly Indeed), both added earlier this year.
Read the board composition as a strategy document. Programmatic, Indeed, Monster. That is not a software bench, it is a distribution and monetization bench. Jobiqo’s own framing is that job boards need to move from selling traffic and postings to selling measurable recruiting outcomes, and CEO Martin Lenz describes programmatic as one layer of a broader performance stack rather than an end in itself. If you are an operator still running on the arbitrage treadmill, your software vendor just told you where it thinks the margin is going.
ADZUNA LIFTS JOBLIFT OFF THE SALES SHELF
Adzuna announced July 15 that it has acquired key assets of Joblift, the Berlin-based aggregator built on blue and grey collar job search in Germany. Terms were not disclosed. Joblift.de continues as a standalone brand in Germany, now running on Adzuna’s platform, while Joblift’s operations in the UK, US, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and France fold fully into Adzuna.
This is Adzuna’s fourth acquisition in four years, after Getwork in the US, Seiza in France, and the Trovit and Mitula job verticals in March. The company now claims a meaningful presence in all four of the world’s largest recruitment markets: the US, UK, Germany, and France.
The systems read: aggregation is consolidating because it has to. When programmatic margins compress, the traffic layer either gets scale or gets sold, and “key assets” is the phrase a press release uses when the buyer took what it wanted and left the rest at the register. Fewer independent aggregators means fewer independent bidders for the same clicks. If you buy or sell traffic in any of these markets, your counterparty list just got shorter, and shorter lists rarely price in your favor.
INDEED 2027: THE COMMISSION PLANS ARE TRICKLING OUT
File this one under rumor, for now. Early details of Indeed’s 2027 commission plans are starting to circulate, and what I am hearing raises questions worth asking before those plans get finalized and locked. I am not publishing specifics until I can verify documents rather than hallway conversation.
This is where you come in. If you have seen a 2027 plan, sat in a briefing, or have a comp sheet burning a hole in your inbox, send it to the Doc. Confidentiality guaranteed, as always. The tip line is always open, and this week it has a specific assignment.
Until Next Time,
Julie “The Doc” Sowash
Standard Disclaimer: Julie is not a lawyer. She has never been a lawyer. She does not play one on TV, at parties, or in this newsletter. Nothing here constitutes legal advice, and citing “but the Job Board Doctor said…” will impress exactly zero compliance officers. Hire a real attorney for real legal questions.
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