How is AB5 (the Gig job crusher) affecting TA Tech vendors

Gig Economy

A recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted how Gig economy companies are dealing with the new California independent contractor law, AB5, that went into effect on 1/1/2020.

While a lot of the attention has been on companies like Uber and Lyft, there are other Gig Work platforms that are also being affected, like Wonolo, a California based gig worker platform.

Wonolo’s workforce is similar to many other platforms, like dog walking, freelance writing, and other platforms that offer independent contractors flexible work hours, but don’t provide benefits. This flexible, no benefits model just got harder to maintain in California, however.

Because Wonolo workers don’t meet the stated exemptions in AB5, the company has chosen to shut down gig operations in California. This is going to be an interesting ride, because California is one of Wonolo’s primary markets. Wonolo, and other applications might be able to continue to scale outside of California, or they’ll face changing to an employee model, similar to typical staffing firms.

What is AB5, and who does it affect?

California AB5 clarifies and creates exemptions to the California Supreme Court 2018 ruling, name Dynamex, making it harder for California companies to classify workers as independent contractors.

In short, AB5 creates a 3 step litmus test. Workers are considered employees, if:
* They perform tasks under a company’s control,
* The work is integral to the company’s business,
* The worker does not have independent enterprises in that trade.

This is going to be interesting to watch, because Uber, Lyft and other large gig platform companies are not laying down on this new classification. They’re fighting the law in court, while also proposing a new law to be listed in upcoming public elections.

There’s no doubt that flexibility of work options is a primary driver of the gig economy. It’s also one of the newest and biggest competitors to the traditional warehouse, hospitality, quick serve restaurant, and other part-time employers.

JobsInLogistics acquires Net-temps – Great combo!

JobsInLogistics-NetTempsJobsInLogistics, one of the strongest brands in the transportation niche recruiting niche, announced the acquisition of Net-temps.com, one of the pioneers of Internet Recruiting, and one of the strongest brands in the Temp-to-Perm and part-time recruiting and staffing niche.

As a long time Internet recruiting veteran and Internet job board pioneer, I’m always interested, and more often, then not, amazed at many of the mergers and acquisitions within the HR technology and Internet Recruiting market.

Many of the Venture Capital funded companies never get off the ground, because they never had a business plan or technology that had much hope of really working (think BranchOut, Jobster, or any and all “automated psychological profile job matching algorithm companies”).

Recently, Glassdoor raised an additional $50 Million, bringing their total investment to over $90 Million. I don’t know the recent valuation for Glassdoor, but if the investors wanted a 10X return, Glassdoor would have to sell for well over $900 Million (a little under the current public valuation of Monster.com and DICE.com, combined).

So, seeing two of the best brands merge, who can provide synergies to each other in a real-profitable way, is always exciting.

Congratulations to Don Firth, of Jobsinlogistics.com, and Sue and Gregg Booth of Net-temps!

What are your thoughts about the acquisition?

Glassdoor raises $50 Million

Glassdoor.com, the website that made it OK to rant (“or praise”) about you’re current and former employers, just announced it has closed another $50 Million venture round.

glassdoorlogo

This brings the total investment to over $93 million, in 6 years.

The company reports 22 Million members from over 190 different countries.
Compete.com shows monthly user visits of 3 Million.

What’s clear is that Glassdoor.com has invested heavily in creating an integrated Internet marketing campaign that leverages social media distribution to gain backlinks for their SEO strategy.

It’s clearly paying off.
* 62 million webpages indexed in Google
* 59,000 top 10 landing pages in Google
* 479,075 total backlinks
* 9,865 backlinks from unique domains
* 4,988 new backlinks

GlassDoor-SEO-SocialVisibility
Glassdoor’s content marketing, blogging, and social media campaigns are top notch.
While Indeed was gaining SEO traction with aggregated job postings (Glassdoor is also doing this, but to a smaller scale), Glassdoor has been building a user-based content hub, like LinkedIn.

Their social stats:
* 11,447 unique pages linked from Facebook, and over 950,000 total links from Facebook alone.
* 2,732 pages linked from Twitter.
* 4,382 pages linked from Google+.
* 886 pages linked from LinkedIn.

* Stats from SearchMetrics.

What do you think?
Does Glassdoor have a big enough business plan, and user base to take on LinkedIn?

Dice.com acquires onTargetJobs – $50 Million cash

Dice Holdings, the parent company of Dice.com, RigZone.com, Slashdot, and other properties, today announced the purchase of onTargetJobs, the parent company of Hcareers.com, HealtheCareers, and Biospace.

The purchase was for $50 million in cash, based on trailing 12 months revenues of approximately $38 million.

The acquisition seems to go along with Dice CEO, Mike Durney’s, vertical roll-up strategy within niche job boards.

The question will remain, can DICE extend the brands and increase revenue across the brands, like they have done with Rigzone, or are they going to leave the brands in autonomy, like the recent acquisition of ITJobBoard in Europe.

DICE has a lot on it’s plate right now. Integrating Open Web, it’s social sourcing tool, it purchase 12 months ago, into the Dice.com search engine, and extending that beyond to other brands.

The Hcareers acquisition will put Dice into the hospitality segment, where it has never competed previously. The HealthECareers seems to be redundant based on their acquisition of AllHealthCareJobs a couple of years back.

How to Build a Social Referral Program (Social Networking + Employee Referrals)

Are you building a Social Recruiting strategy?
Are you trying to figure out how to increase engagement with your Employee Referral program?

Watch the video above and see how you can start getting employees to start sharing your job postings with their professional connections, former colleagues, and friends.

If you already have a employee referral program, with a couple of quick changes, you can build a Social Referral program, that leverages your employees’ social and professional networks to get access to their colleagues, friends, and connections.

The goal is to get your current employees to share your job descriptions with their social and professional networks on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google plus or even other forum or technical related websites.

If you’ve tried this before, and didn’t have any success, don’t give up.
It does work, and very effectively, but there are a couple of steps that you have to take to make it work.