Acqui­si­tions seem to be in the air – see Bull­horn acquires Tex­tk­er­nel, for exam­ple. Or Jobtoolz, or NetJobs, or… You get the idea. And could it be that Indeed’s traf­fic is falling? Read on to find out:

• Jobtoolz acquires Hire­hive: Bel­gian-based recruit­ment plat­form Jobtoolz has acquired Hire­hive, an Irish ATS. Jobtoolz is a recruit­ment plat­form for SMEs and organ­i­sa­tions, with a strong focus on employ­er brand­ing, an auto­mat­ed recruit­ment process and recruit­ment mar­ket­ing. Hire­hive allows busi­ness­es to organ­ise their hir­ing, com­mu­ni­cate with tal­ent and review can­di­dates as a team. Con­grats!
• JobIndex pays out big div­i­dend: Den­mark-based recruit­ment mar­ket­place JobIndex will pay out DKK90 mil­lion ($13.1 mil­lion U.S.) in div­i­dends — a high­er fig­ure than its after-tax prof­it for last year (DKK 82.7 mil­lion). This rep­re­sents a pay­out of DKK100 per share. The main ben­e­fi­cia­ry will be Kaare Danielsen, the com­pa­ny’s founder, major­i­ty own­er and CEO. He will receive 93% of the total pay­out. Last year, Danielsen delist­ed the com­pa­ny from Nas­daq First North Growth Mar­ket Den­mark. In oth­er JobIndex news, net sales declined by. 8.0% year on year (y‑o-y) to DKK98 mil­lion ($14.2 mil­lion U.S.) dur­ing the first three months of 2024. Inter­est­ing.
• Bull­horn acquires Tex­tk­er­nel: Bull­horn acquired Tex­tk­er­nel, an Ams­ter­dam-based provider of AI recruit­ing tools for the staffing indus­try that include résumé match­ing, labor mar­ket ana­lyt­ics, seman­tic search and sourc­ing tools. Tex­tk­er­nel has more than 2,000 cus­tomers glob­al­ly, includ­ing eight of the top 10 staffing firms, accord­ing to the post. Bull­horn’s acqui­si­tion of Tex­tk­er­nel fol­lows anoth­er acqui­si­tion ear­li­er this year of Mploy­ee, a Nether­lands-based front- and mid­dle-office staffing soft­ware provider. Con­grats!
• Indeed’s traf­fic falls: Traf­fic at Indeed is show­ing an alarm­ing trend, with total vis­its drop­ping 10% glob­al­ly — and 9.4% in the U.S. — between Jan­u­ary and May. Accord­ing to data from Sim­i­lar­web and SEM Rush, Indeed had a total of between 578 mil­lion and 583 mil­lion vis­its a month in May. In the U.S., these fig­ures were 263 mil­lion to 243 mil­lion, respec­tive­ly, dur­ing the same month. This all comes on the heels of falling rev­enues. From April 2023 to April 2024, paid job post­ings on Indeed fell 12% (which was bet­ter than last sum­mer’s 50% drop). Hmmm.
• Get­Why rais­es funds: Get­Why, a con­sumer research tech com­pa­ny that helps busi­ness­es car­ry out mar­ket stud­ies and extract insights from video-based inter­views using AI, has raised $34.5 mil­lion in a Series A round of fund­ing from Cal­i­for­nia-based VC firm, PeakSpan Cap­i­tal. Get­Why, a con­sumer research tech com­pa­ny that helps busi­ness­es car­ry out mar­ket stud­ies and extract insights from video-based inter­views using AI, has raised $34.5 mil­lion in a Series A round of fund­ing from Cal­i­for­nia-based VC firm, PeakSpan Cap­i­tal. The com­pa­ny’s big sell­ing point is Bloom, an AI plat­form that ana­lyzes video respons­es to ques­tions and presents these as qual­i­ta­tive insights. Intrigu­ing.
• Pracuj adds blue col­lar sec­tion: Gru­pa Pracu­j’s Pracuj.pl, the lead­ing recruit­ment site in Poland, has launched a ded­i­cat­ed sec­tion for blue-col­lar jobs. This new sec­tion cur­rent­ly fea­tures 17,462 blue-col­lar job list­ings out of a total of 88,357 post­ings. Pracuj.pl holds a dom­i­nant posi­tion in the local recruit­ment mar­ket for white-col­lar jobs. How­ev­er, it faces sig­nif­i­cant com­pe­ti­tion in the blue-col­lar seg­ment from the likes of OLX Jobs and Pra­cazaRo­giem. Good move.
• JobGet acquires Wirkn: JobGet acquired Wirkn, a recruit­ing plat­form with ATS, the abil­i­ty for employ­ers to cre­ate brand­ed job sites and oth­er func­tion­al­i­ty. Wirkn focus­es on retail busi­ness at malls and oth­er shop­ping cen­ters. JobGet is based in Boston and pro­duces an app for hir­ing hourly work­ers.  Wirkn serves a net­work of more than 17,000 mall, retail and restau­rant loca­tions. A meet­ing of odd names!
• NetJobs to be acquired?: Swe­den-based job board oper­a­tor NetJobs Group appears like­ly to be delist­ed from Stock­holm-based Nas­daq First North after major­i­ty share­hold­er Hen­rik Kvick — via his invest­ment com­pa­ny Troll­hol­men — offered to buy out minor­i­ty share­hold­ers in the com­pa­ny for SEK12.0 mil­lion ($1.2 mil­lion). NetJobs has been strug­gling for near­ly a decade. Dur­ing the peri­od 2016–2022, it lost a total of SEK13.9 mil­lion ($1.3m) and lost SEK5.5 mil­lion in 2023 alone, exclud­ing one-off items. In Q1 2024, it lost SEK1.7 mil­lion. Since 2016, rev­enue at NetJobs has more than halved. Hmm.

Nev­er a dull moment in this indus­try, eh? Acqui­si­tions, fund­ing, weird names – and even a lit­tle bit of AI! It’s almost 100% like­ly that AI will pop up again next month. Until then…

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