LinkedIn rival Xing acquires recruitment platform Honeypot

Germany based company, Xing has acquired recruitment platform Honeypot for up to $64 million. Xing shared in media that Honeypot is its biggest acquisition to date.

Xing, a business-based networking platform has made this acquisition to acquisition to kickstart its recruitment business ahead of a rebrand of the business as “New Work.” The company plans to rebrand as New Work in the second half of 2019, bringing together a number of other assets it has acquired and built over the years.

Xing is very positive about this acquisition and said in media that they already offered job listings as part of its platform, with 20,000 businesses as customers; but Honeypot will add a few different things to the mix.

The acquisition will give Xing more traction specifically in the tech vertical since Honeypot first started in 2015 targeting developers although it later expanded to other tech jobs.

Additionally, the acquisition will help Xing make a bigger push into building its profile outside of Germany into more of Europe, as New Work.

Xing was founded in 2003 and was considered a would-be rival to LinkedIn. While LinkedIn today has some 600 million users and was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion, Xing is publicly traded and currently valued at around $2 billion (€1.81 billion), with some 15 million members.

The company is still relatively small but growing, adding 1,000 IT specialists to its books each week, with some 100,000 individuals and 1,500 businesses currently registered.