Today we’re look­ing at 2023: the job board year in review. Why? Well, it was a heck of a year, to be hon­est. 2022 was a very strong year for employ­ment and job boards, if you remem­ber, and there was hope that the same would hap­pen in 2023. Guess what? It did­n’t. The first, sec­ond and even a good part of the third quar­ter was not great for many job boards – yet by the final quar­ter, things were look­ing up once again. Let’s dig into what hap­pened, month by month:

• Jan­u­ary: Beam­ery led the way, lay­ing off a tenth of its staff. Axel Springer announced (again) a prob­a­bly IPO for Step­stone. Recruit announced a big div­i­dend – good news for the com­pa­ny, but this would not last, sad­ly.
• Feb­ru­ary: Madrid’s Joband­tal­ent achieved a 90% increase in annu­al rev­enue over 2022. How­ev­er, LinkedIn showed a slow­ing in its rev­enue growth. DHI was feel­ing pret­ty good with an increase in 4th quar­ter year over year rev­enue of 17.8%. France’s Wel­come To The Jun­gle raised a new $54 mil­lion (€50 mil­lion) Series C round. And Jooble launched a start­up incu­ba­tor.
• March: Recruit’s rev­enues fell on a U.S. dol­lar basis, and the com­pa­ny revised guid­ance for the com­ing year. ZipRecruiter made the inex­plic­a­ble deci­sion to part­ner with AntMan to pro­mote their 1Click Apply. UpWork’s rev­enue jumped 18% year over year for the fourth quar­ter. France’s Freelance.com also saw rev­enues rise by 23%. And let us not for­get Indeed’s bum­bling roll­out of CPA!
• April: Mitrat­e­ch, a legal, com­pli­ance and HR soft­ware com­pa­ny, acquired Cir­ca. Japan-based job site oper­a­tor MyNavi acquired India-based HR intel­li­gence com­pa­ny Peo­pleMat­ters and Tennavi-job.com. Indeed and Glass­door laid off 15% of their work­force. Talent.com laid off 18% of their work­force. LinkedIn began test­ing AI-pow­ered job post­ings. The U.S. gov­ern­ment set­tled an employ­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion com­plaint against DHI Group, a devel­op­ment that brings into ques­tion long-held lia­bil­i­ty pro­tec­tions that recruit­ment sites have enjoyed along­side oth­er inter­net pub­lish­ers.
• May: New leg­is­la­tion required that EU com­pa­nies dis­close infor­ma­tion that makes it eas­i­er for employ­ees to com­pare salaries and to expose exist­ing gen­der pay gaps. LinkedIn rev­enue rose 10% in con­stant cur­ren­cy to more than $3.70 bil­lion. DHI Group’s first-quar­ter rev­enue rose 12.5% year over year to $38.6 mil­lion. True, a glob­al plat­form of tal­ent man­age­ment prod­ucts and ser­vices based in Had­don­field, New Jer­sey, acquired Jop­well, a New York-based hir­ing plat­form for diver­si­ty stu­dents and ear­ly-to-mid-career pro­fes­sion­als.
• June: Kaare Danielsen, the founder, CEO and major­i­ty own­er of Den­mark-based job board JobIndex, decid­ed to delist the com­pa­ny from Nas­daq First North Growth Mar­ket Den­mark. Twit­ter bought IT recruit­ment plat­form Lask­ie. Veri­tone, a pub­licly trad­ed Cal­i­for­nia enter­prise com­pa­ny focused on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, announced plans to pay $52 mil­lion for Broad­bean. Chi­na-based clas­si­fieds giant 58.Com planned to cut up to 14,000 jobs. Out­sourced recruit­ment com­pa­ny Recruiter.com g0t a new CEO, a new name and a new strate­gic direc­tion as an AI-focused hir­ing con­sul­tan­cy.
• July: App­cast acquired recruit­ment mar­ket­ing firm Bayard Adver­tis­ing. Indeed was “final­iz­ing our plans for addi­tion­al mar­ket expan­sion” after rolling out pay-for-per­for­mance in France, fol­low­ing launch­es in the U.S., U.K. and Cana­da.  Joonko, a hir­ing plat­form focused on DEI, was shut down after  Joonko’s board of direc­tors said the com­pa­ny’s results had been man­u­fac­tured, and much of what founder and CEO Ilit Raz report­ed to them “had no basis in real­i­ty.” France’s Monster.fr, which intro­duced pay for per­for­mance options in 2022, was now refin­ing and pro­mot­ing its PPA options as well.
• August: Rev­enue declined at Indeed, which saw paid job ads fall by 50%. Rev­enue rose 7% year over year in con­stant cur­ren­cy at LinkedIn in its fis­cal fourth quar­ter end­ed June 30. Rand­stad rev­enue fell 5% year over year on an organ­ic basis in the 2nd quar­ter to €6.47 bil­lion. DHI Group’s Q2 results show rev­enue was $38.5 mil­lion, up 4% year over year, while total book­ings were $32.3 mil­lion, down 9% year over year.  Upwork’s Q2 rev­enue rose 7.5% year over year to $168.6 mil­lion, and gross mar­gin improved.
• Sep­tem­ber: X, for­mer­ly Twit­ter, took the next step in its for­ay into the recruit­ment space, offer­ing access to the beta ver­sion of its hir­ing ser­vice. Gru­pa Pracuj, the par­ent com­pa­ny of a num­ber of East­ern Euro­pean job board brands, report­ed con­sol­i­dat­ed rev­enue today for the sec­ond quar­ter of PLN 184.3 mil­lion (€41.2 mil­lion), an increase of 33.4%.  Info Edge India Ltd., the par­ent com­pa­ny of Naukri and 99Acres, post­ed INR5.8 bil­lion ($70.4 mil­lion U.S.) for the three months end­ing June 30. French tal­ent plat­form Freelance.com report­ed rev­enue of €210.9 mil­lion for the sec­ond quar­ter end­ed 30 June 2023, an increase of 5%.
• Octo­ber:  Job adver­tise­ments in Aus­tralia plum­met­ed by 20.5% year-on-year in August 2023, accord­ing to data from job board Seek.  Japan-based recruit­ment mar­ket­place Find­Job ceased oper­a­tions after more than a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry. Berlin-based PowerUs, a career plat­form for skilled blue-col­lar work­ers such as elec­tri­cians and plant mechan­ics, raised €24.0 mil­lion ($25.7 mil­lion U.S.).
• Novem­ber: LinkedIn laid off approx­i­mate­ly 668 peo­ple across its engi­neer­ing, prod­uct, tal­ent and finance teams. DHI Group report­ed third-quar­ter rev­enue fell 2.8% year over year to $37.4 mil­lion. Employ­men­tHero, an Aus­tralia-based provider of end-to-end HRTech ser­vices, raised A$263 mil­lion ($167 mil­lion U.S.). Ham­burg-based Xing piv­ot­ed its busi­ness mod­el from a pro­fes­sion­al social net­work to a job board.  Step­stone announced that it was lay­ing off “rough­ly” 215 employ­ees, about 5% of the com­pa­ny’s 4,200-strong work­force.
• Decem­ber: Fiverr report­ed rev­enue growth of 12.1% for the third quar­ter of 2023 end­ed 30 Sep­tem­ber 2023. Rev­enue fell at Indeed and Glass­door amid uncer­tain eco­nom­ic con­di­tions, and the new pric­ing mod­el at Indeed helped push down paid job ads; Indeed also can­celled their pay per appli­ca­tion offer­ing.  Third-quar­ter rev­enue at ZipRecruiter fell 31.4% to $155.6 mil­lion. Upwork report­ed third-quar­ter rev­enue rose 10.8% year over year. Rev­enue at Ger­many-based New Work SE, the par­ent com­pa­ny of job net­work Xing and employ­er rat­ing por­tal Kununu, fell by 3.8% year on year (y‑o-y) to €75.7 mil­lion ($80.8 mil­lion U.S.) in the three months to Sep­tem­ber 2023. Final­ly, in some sym­me­try to their Jan­u­ary lay­offs, Beam­ery shed 25 per­cent of its work­force.

Kind of a Dick­en­sian tale, eh? The best of times, the worst of times – depend­ing on which job board you were in our 2023: the job board year in review. Let’s see how 2024 plays out!

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