Huz­zle rais­es funds – you heard right. Don’t know what’s up with the name, but some­times this indus­try gets weird. It also turns out that LinkedIn con­tin­ues to find new ways to squeeze more mon­ey out of their plat­form – a les­son for the rest of us, right? And of course, AI. Let’s see what’s hap­pened in the past few weeks:

• Upwork rev­enue up: Upwork report­ed first-quar­ter rev­enue rose 18.7% to $190.9 mil­lion. Gross mar­gin at the tal­ent plat­form also improved, and net income rose 7.4%. Rev­enue growth was dri­ven, in part, by the final tran­si­tion to the com­pa­ny’s new flat-fee pric­ing struc­ture that was intro­duced last year. Upwork’s gross ser­vices vol­ume — the total amount that clients spend on Upwork’s offer­ings as well as addi­tion­al fees to tal­ent and clients for oth­er ser­vices — rose 1% to near­ly $1.01 bil­lion. Impres­sive.
• LinkedIn tests Pre­mi­um Com­pa­ny Page offer­ing: LinkedIn is work­ing on a new LinkedIn Pre­mi­um Com­pa­ny Page sub­scrip­tion, which — for fees that appear to be as steep as $99/month — will include AI to write con­tent and new tools to grow fol­low­er counts, among oth­er fea­tures to raise the pro­files of the com­pa­ny using them. The move is sig­nif­i­cant because it under­scores how Microsoft-owned LinkedIn con­tin­ues to diver­si­fy its busi­ness mod­el — while also try­ing to make itself more use­ful over­all. Oth­er busi­ness-focused tiers include Pre­mi­um Career for peo­ple on the job hunt, Pre­mi­um Busi­ness for busi­ness intel­li­gence, Sales Nav­i­ga­tor for sales teams, Recruiter tiers for sourc­ing and hir­ing tal­ent and LinkedIn Learn­ing for pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment. Hmm. It may be work­ing, because Linked­In’s q3 rev­enue showed dou­ble dig­it growth:  $4.0 bil­lion in rev­enue for the three months to March 2023 (Q3 FY2024), up 10% year-on-year (y‑o-y) thanks to growth across all lines of busi­ness. Yow.
• Mul­ti­verse acquires Search­light: Mul­ti­verse, the U.K. uni­corn that builds appren­tice­ship pro­grams for peo­ple to learn tech­nol­o­gy skills while on the job, has bought Search­light, a start­up that builds AI-based recruit­ment and assess­ment prod­ucts. The plan will be to use Search­light’s tech to cre­ate new AI prod­ucts that Mul­ti­verse can use to expand its train­ing ser­vices for pro­fes­sion­als.  This acqui­si­tion address­es an area where AI is being employed: Edtech com­pa­nies focus­ing on work­ing envi­ron­ments want — and are expect­ed by their cus­tomers — to use AI to build more effi­cient pro­fes­sion­al train­ing ser­vices to fill recruit­ment gaps. Intrigu­ing.
• Career­Arc acquires Lumi­na: Career­Arc has acquired Lumi­na, say­ing the deal sup­ports its aim to build auto­mat­ed video cre­ation into its offer­ing to help solve a major chal­lenge for recruit­ment mar­ket­ing — con­tent cre­ation. Lumi­na visu­al job post­ings can be embed­ded into job boards and career pages to pro­mote employ­er brand­ing and increase appli­ca­tions. Found­ed in 2009, Career­Arc said it plans to launch fur­ther updates to its employ­ment con­tent cre­ation ser­vices lat­er this year. Con­grats!
• Huz­zle rais­es funds: Lon­don-based start­up Huz­zle has raised €1.67 mil­lion in pre-seed fund­ing to trans­form the ear­ly careers space. Found­ed in 2021, Huz­zle is build­ing a three-sided mar­ket­place that con­nects stu­dents, soci­eties, and employ­ers. Start­ing as a CRM for stu­dent organ­i­sa­tions, it has grown into a career com­pan­ion used by more than 80,000 stu­dents, gen­er­at­ing over 1,000 job appli­ca­tions and event reg­is­tra­tions per day. Inter­est­ing, but what’s with the name, eh?
• Doda.jp intro­duces AI-dri­ven resume tool: Doda.jp, a recruit­ment mar­ket­place based in Japan, intro­duced a new GenAI tool for resume cre­ation, tak­ing a cue from a sur­vey that found CV writ­ing as a key prob­lem for most of the job appli­cants even after career coun­selling. Accord­ing to Doda, it takes as lit­tle as one minute for the tool to com­plete a pro­file in local lan­guage focus­ing read­abil­i­ty, com­pre­hen­sive­ness, accu­ra­cy, suit­abil­i­ty, speci­fici­ty and unique­ness. In a beta test, the pro­file mak­er got a sat­is­fac­to­ry nod from 95% of users with 1.2 times improve­ment in writ­ing and edit­ing. We’ll be see­ing a lot of this sort of stuff!
• Jobcube expands into the US: The Japan-based aggre­ga­tor Jobcube has expand­ed into the US mar­ket. It is part of the group com­pa­ny Kakaku.com, Inc., which has been oper­at­ing the job search ser­vice “Kyu­jin-Box” in Japan since 2015 and will lever­age its accu­mu­lat­ed knowl­edge to expand “Jobcube” to oth­er mar­kets aside from the US.  Jobcube aggre­gates and pro­vides the details of more than five mil­lion jobs at any giv­en time, includ­ing full-time, part-time, con­tract, and remote jobs. We can always use anoth­er aggre­ga­tor…
• InfoEdge billings rise: Info Edge, the Indi­an job board, report­ed stand­alone billings increased by 10.4% dur­ing the fourth quar­ter end­ed 31 March 2024. Last month, Google rein­stat­ed Info Edge’s mobile appli­ca­tions name­ly, Naukri recruiter and Shik­sha, on its Google Play Store, after the tech giant began remov­ing the apps of 10 com­pa­nies in India in a dis­pute over ser­vice fee pay­ments. Info Edge also post­ed full year stand­alone billings of INR 24.95 bil­lion, up 5.4% com­pared with the pri­or year. Inter­est­ing.
• Job­Can­non acquires Adsme:  Ukraine-found­ed recruit­ment start­up Job­Can­non has acquired Ukrain­ian start­up Adsme. Job­Can­non uses AI to sim­pli­fy job search­es and tal­ent acqui­si­tion. Adsme’s tech­nol­o­gy allows for real-time fore­cast­ing of over 20 mil­lion results in visu­al and tex­tu­al adver­tis­ing on Meta Ads (Face­book, Insta­gram) and pro­vides rec­om­men­da­tions for opti­mis­ing any of its ele­ments. Con­grats!
• CV Wal­let launch­es can­di­date ver­i­fi­ca­tion: Rectech start­up CV Wal­let has launched SaaS can­di­date ver­i­fi­ca­tion for recruiters. Co-founder Richard Collins said “it is a com­bi­na­tion of screen­ing with proof, ref­er­enc­ing light with a sprin­kling of skills assess­ments, using AI and 3rd par­ty data checks.” Good idea.
• Rand­stad rev­enue falls: Rand­stad report­ed chal­leng­ing mar­ket con­di­tions in the first quar­ter. Client activ­i­ty remained sub­dued. First-quar­ter rev­enue fell 8% year over year on an organ­ic basis to €5.94 bil­lion (US$6.41 bil­lion). US rev­enue was down 15% year over year in the first quar­ter on an organ­ic basis com­pared to a 16% decline in the fourth quar­ter. Hmm.
• CareerIndex launch­es con­ver­sa­tion­al AI inter­view ser­vice: Japan-based mar­ket­place oper­a­tor CareerIndex has com­menced a proof of con­cept of AI inter­view ser­vice ShaiN to man­age pre­lim­i­nary inter­view vol­ume and over­come time and geo­graph­i­cal bar­ri­ers. More than 500 com­pa­nies have used ShaiN. ShaiN is a con­ver­sa­tion­al AI inter­view, con­duct­ing ini­tial recruit­ment inter­views on behalf of employ­ers, with ques­tions based on pro­pri­etary inter­view method­ol­o­gy, improv­ing eval­u­a­tion, uni­fy­ing hir­ing cri­te­ria and form­ing impar­tial short­lists. Tip of the ice­berg!

Well, you can see that fund­ing, acqui­si­tions, and prod­uct intro­duc­tions are hap­pen­ing apace these days. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, there were many more AI prod­uct intros that I did­n’t have room to cov­er – but they are out there. Won­der what’s next? I guess we’ll find out.

[Want to get Job Board Doc­tor posts via email? Sub­scribe here.].
[Check out the Job­Board­Geek pod­cast archive!]

Related