Surprised no one has mention it yet, but Recruit Holdings is the parent company of Indeed.
So the combination of Indeed's set of basically every job listing and Glassdoor's set of reviews seems like a strong synergy to fight against Google and Facebook's move into the space.
Indeed/Recruit has made several big acquisitions in the past year including SimplyHired and Workopolis.
Note: I founded/work at a startup in the same space.
Recruit also has brought Indeed, originally an American company, strongly to its home turf, Japan. At face value it "competes" with the older job hunting services owned by Recruit, but they are differentiating the brands while they surely benefit from the synergy.
> Surprised no one has mention it yet, but Recruit Holdings is the parent company of Indeed.
As of right now (2018-05-09T14:33Z), the article reads ‘Recruit Holdings, a large Japanese human resources company that owns other job sites like Indeed’ …
Recruit has been on a spending spree. As what happened with SimplyHired and Workopolis, I'm guessing the data in GlassDoor will be integrated into Indeed's own platform and then GlassDoor will become another frontend for https://www.indeed.com/companies
I didn't knew Recruit is the parent company of Indeed, it makes more sense now. I see your start up is Zippia. It looks to me that it's a good looking indeed :) and seems you are doing well, Congrats on that.
I did a small start up in this space sometime back and super interested in everything recruiting, would you mind if I reach out with few questions?
Is this not a conflict of interest? I always assumed the Glassdoor (like the BBB) will remove unfavorable reviews for a price. Now that I know that they are part of an org that also does recruiting I know it. Their review quality was not much better than Amazon's and now it will get worse.
My gut reaction to seeing this headline was shock at the sticker price. I did some more research and found some more interesting numbers for this company.
They raised 204.5 Million dollars over 9 venture financing rounds. They have approximately 800 current employees. Does any of this seem wild to anyone else?
>They raised 204.5 Million dollars over 9 venture financing rounds. They have approximately 800 current employees. Does any of this seem wild to anyone else?
This honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. They made a ~5x exit after 10 years of raising funds and developing the site. Glassdoor easily has the most reliable salary and job data for software engineers that exists, even beyond LinkedIn which Microsoft just paid $26 billion for, and that's incredibly valuable. I see this entirely as a smart acqui-hire and data acquisition move. Nothing to do with revenue.
Glassdoor seems like a pretty simple website, but it's still the main platform for company salaries and reviews. That data allows them to get a piece of the huge recruiting market. Compare to LinkedIn which is 20x more expensive.
According to another HN commenter, they were making over $170m in revenue and were growing 30% year on year. A 7x multiple on sales does not seem that weird for a price. it is way more reasonable than 90% of the unicorns startups we see now.
Shock because the price seemed to high, or too low? This seems reasonable / a good deal to me. I recently found the website useful- they have a lot of data, and offer a good incentive to acquire more data (Add a salary / review to see more).
I was guessing like a team of 20, maybe a third of which software/devops. 800? Jesus christ, unless they're counting mechancial turk penny modearators as employees then I'm speechless.
Whats the ultimate goal revenue wise? Something like -
Hey HR at XYZ. Pay $xxx to see which redacted current and old employees said you were shit. Trim the snitches with Recruit Holdings..
Glassdoor is really useful for researching companies. Usually I go straight to the reviews and sort in descending order by date. I look for:
-Distribution between good and bad reviews
-common themes among bad reviews
-lots of good reviews on same day or around same time (usually means HR planted reviews)
I’m still trying to figure out what it means when a company has very few total reviews given the size and history of the company from a “is this a good or bad or neutral sign.” For example, I’m really surprised Stripe only has 59 reviews since I thought they had over 1000 employees at this point and has been around for 8 years or so. (Airbnb has 700+ and Pinterest has 200+ for comparison)
I would consider this a bad sign. My wife recently left a company that had few reviews. The management would actively try to remove bad reviews on any basis possible, and have been successful enough at it. If you look at her (small company's) page, the reviews tend to be very polarized- "Great Place to Work!" "Keeping it 100!" to "Miserably failed at just about everything" and the reviews tend to be 5 stars or 1 star. There is not a single 3 star, and only 2 4-star reviews for a company rated overall at 3.4 stars. HR is almost certainly seeding it with good reviews, and several employees have had their reviews pulled, resulting in their reviews not in any way resembling a normal distribution.
Anecdotes aside, I think there are real tells:
-Review numbers being "hollow" in the middle.
-Data not quite adding up- for this particular company, No one has hit the "approves of the CEO" button, but I once looked at a startup that was quite the opposite- 85% approved despite a middling overall rating. Was the founder just beloved? Its hard to say, but I found the lack of matchup concerning.
-Are a significant number of complaints consistently in certain areas? Work life balance bad, bad leadership, etc... if so... these are probably true, and people not mentioning that may need closer examination.
Some companies actively encourage people to review them on glassdoor. While I have not seen example of the opposite, I suspect that there may be companies that warn otherwise <s> due to fear of leaking their proprietary hiring process </s>.
Seems HN readership doesn't have much job hunting experience! Glassdoor, although often wildly inaccurate and empty of data, is still one of the most useful resources out there for job hunting and conducting due diligence on companies. I do wish their data was better though ...
It's definitely easier to spot the soul sucking companies. They are the ones with the majority of bad reviews spotted with glorious reviews left by management trying to up their average.
Interesting to see new resources like http://levels.fyi which has more granular compensation data for companies on a level by level basis, wonder if the trend is moving towards completely open models where things aren’t hidden behind sign up walls
Small companies maybe, but larger companies seem to have different cultures depending on which department you work in and where. I worked in a satellite office of a company that was based aboot 200 miles away and our experiences were a lot different from each other.
As much as GD gets under my skin, it has actually been useful to me. I looked up a firm and saw that many reviewers thought the CEO was nutz (along with many astroturfed reviews). After a 2 hour phone interview (5-7pm on a Friday) I left a similar review. Gotta pass it along.
One thing that GD could do is launch into the #MeToo movement. Instead of excel files, having GD as a clearinghouse would be useful. The glaring libel and slander issues aside, it would be an exceedingly brave step, an unlikely one for GD, but a very useful one.
I've never heard of Recruit Holdings before, but when I do some digging, I was surprised on how big the money is with Staffing/Recruiting companies.
Not that Glassdoor is currently unbiased, but a staffing company owning Glassdoor would be like telling all other companies either you recruit through us or there'll be a bunch of negative reviews in a month.
Everything about Glassdoor is a bit bizarre to me.
I'm really surprised that it took 800 people and $200m to build.
I'm even more amazed that someone's willing to part with $1.2B for what is effectively a digital BBB clone with less reliable reviews...
Particularly in what seems like a bad time to be buying anything consumer facing with a major European presence W/ GDPR around the corner. It looks like they paid a premium though.
I wonder if their monetization strategy will follow the same path, squeeze companies for cash (likely to remove reviews)?
Why does no one get that it takes lots of headcount to do ads and sales? According to another HN commenter they were pulling $170m in revenue and growing at a 30% rate. They had job listing ads from literally all the major companies and you need people to help close those deals.
People seem to forget that you need big sales teams to build a huge advertising business. Even companies like Google with self serve advertising products have 1000s of employees because closing big advertising deals with corporations requires big sales and operations teams.
Wow... On surface seems a heck of price for business where the data is totally unvalidated. I do use them time to time to mine what my competitors might be upto... Has thrown out a few gems over the years....but takes a lot of human filtering.
As many others, I'm surprised at the price tag. Does anyone know more information of their revenue / top drivers of revenue? I work on a website in this space (leveling / salary information) and surprised to see how lucrative it is. We've monetized (https://www.Levels.fyi) with Ads so far and done very well with SEO relatively but 1B is a different league entirely.
a few years back i learned that glassdoor was co-founded by Rich Barton who founded both Zillow and Expedia (another interesting fact I didn't know until then: Expedia was a MS spin-off, Rich Barton built in-house at MS and then Gates and Ballmer gave the blessing to go on their own) - he's also a partner at Benchmark.
Never loved glassdoor but find it useful on a regular basis when hiring (esp. as one data point for comp comparisons when hiring in tech) and seems to fill a need that isn't served elsewhere (essentially yelp for HR, serving both sides), but it's not-very-sexy design made a lot more sense when I thought of it in the lineage of the majorly successful but also not-very-sexily-designed expedia/zillow. in any case, impressive for Barton to have so many successful businesses/exits and still be relatively under-the-radar compared to other comparable founders (maybe because he's based in SEA), definitely someone to follow for those who like to keep track of serial entrepreneurs.
So, who else wonders what they could do if Glassdoor conveniently logged the IP of the reporters combined with the salaries? Little evil me would sell that data to recruiters so they can use it to figure out the least amount of money that will dislodge a particular person from their current job.
I thought this Glassdoor was like someones pet project that aggregated job spots reviews. How they ever made any money?? What was their business model?
I saw my reviews on the interview process for IBM and couple of other companies disappear without trace. So my guess is their business model is trying to get companies to pay to remove bad reviews.
At some point in the past I was wondering how hard it would be to do sentiment analysis based on Glassdoor reviews of public companies to try and trade on the results.
I could swear when I dug into this I found that they had actually licensed out their dataset to a couple of hedge funds already that were doing exactly that (and paying for the privilege).
I can’t find this anymore, so maybe I am imagining things? At any rate this FT article implies there were people out there likely doing this though unclear if they paid Glassdoor for the privilege: https://www.ft.com/content/d86ad460-8802-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45...
[+] [-] kolz13|7 years ago|reply
So the combination of Indeed's set of basically every job listing and Glassdoor's set of reviews seems like a strong synergy to fight against Google and Facebook's move into the space.
Indeed/Recruit has made several big acquisitions in the past year including SimplyHired and Workopolis.
Note: I founded/work at a startup in the same space.
[+] [-] GolDDranks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rauhl|7 years ago|reply
As of right now (2018-05-09T14:33Z), the article reads ‘Recruit Holdings, a large Japanese human resources company that owns other job sites like Indeed’ …
[+] [-] lykr0n|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vthallam|7 years ago|reply
I did a small start up in this space sometime back and super interested in everything recruiting, would you mind if I reach out with few questions?
[+] [-] dexterdog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rglovejoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg_bot|7 years ago|reply
They raised 204.5 Million dollars over 9 venture financing rounds. They have approximately 800 current employees. Does any of this seem wild to anyone else?
[+] [-] aphextron|7 years ago|reply
This honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. They made a ~5x exit after 10 years of raising funds and developing the site. Glassdoor easily has the most reliable salary and job data for software engineers that exists, even beyond LinkedIn which Microsoft just paid $26 billion for, and that's incredibly valuable. I see this entirely as a smart acqui-hire and data acquisition move. Nothing to do with revenue.
[+] [-] allenz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmVess|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billsmithaustin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hunter23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samdoidge|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitepodmatt|7 years ago|reply
Whats the ultimate goal revenue wise? Something like - Hey HR at XYZ. Pay $xxx to see which redacted current and old employees said you were shit. Trim the snitches with Recruit Holdings..
[+] [-] dawhizkid|7 years ago|reply
I’m still trying to figure out what it means when a company has very few total reviews given the size and history of the company from a “is this a good or bad or neutral sign.” For example, I’m really surprised Stripe only has 59 reviews since I thought they had over 1000 employees at this point and has been around for 8 years or so. (Airbnb has 700+ and Pinterest has 200+ for comparison)
[+] [-] kevstev|7 years ago|reply
Anecdotes aside, I think there are real tells: -Review numbers being "hollow" in the middle. -Data not quite adding up- for this particular company, No one has hit the "approves of the CEO" button, but I once looked at a startup that was quite the opposite- 85% approved despite a middling overall rating. Was the founder just beloved? Its hard to say, but I found the lack of matchup concerning. -Are a significant number of complaints consistently in certain areas? Work life balance bad, bad leadership, etc... if so... these are probably true, and people not mentioning that may need closer examination.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majani|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mv4|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rajacombinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clubber|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cylinder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|7 years ago|reply
As much as GD gets under my skin, it has actually been useful to me. I looked up a firm and saw that many reviewers thought the CEO was nutz (along with many astroturfed reviews). After a 2 hour phone interview (5-7pm on a Friday) I left a similar review. Gotta pass it along.
One thing that GD could do is launch into the #MeToo movement. Instead of excel files, having GD as a clearinghouse would be useful. The glaring libel and slander issues aside, it would be an exceedingly brave step, an unlikely one for GD, but a very useful one.
[+] [-] kapilkale|7 years ago|reply
This means they were doing ~$170M top-line, up from $130M in the year prior.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/japan-s-r...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-webs...
[+] [-] hunter23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vthallam|7 years ago|reply
Not that Glassdoor is currently unbiased, but a staffing company owning Glassdoor would be like telling all other companies either you recruit through us or there'll be a bunch of negative reviews in a month.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dhimes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] px1999|7 years ago|reply
I'm really surprised that it took 800 people and $200m to build.
I'm even more amazed that someone's willing to part with $1.2B for what is effectively a digital BBB clone with less reliable reviews...
Particularly in what seems like a bad time to be buying anything consumer facing with a major European presence W/ GDPR around the corner. It looks like they paid a premium though.
I wonder if their monetization strategy will follow the same path, squeeze companies for cash (likely to remove reviews)?
[+] [-] hunter23|7 years ago|reply
People seem to forget that you need big sales teams to build a huge advertising business. Even companies like Google with self serve advertising products have 1000s of employees because closing big advertising deals with corporations requires big sales and operations teams.
[+] [-] nailer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkeydust|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zaheer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshjkim|7 years ago|reply
Never loved glassdoor but find it useful on a regular basis when hiring (esp. as one data point for comp comparisons when hiring in tech) and seems to fill a need that isn't served elsewhere (essentially yelp for HR, serving both sides), but it's not-very-sexy design made a lot more sense when I thought of it in the lineage of the majorly successful but also not-very-sexily-designed expedia/zillow. in any case, impressive for Barton to have so many successful businesses/exits and still be relatively under-the-radar compared to other comparable founders (maybe because he's based in SEA), definitely someone to follow for those who like to keep track of serial entrepreneurs.
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightedman|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sschueller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guessmyname|7 years ago|reply
Advertisement [1] but also [2][3][4].
[1] http://resources.glassdoor.com/advertising-on-glassdoor.html
[2] http://vator.tv/news/2015-06-20-how-does-glassdoor-make-mone...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-does-Glassdoor-make-money
[4] https://www.quora.com/How-does-Glassdoors-business-model-wor...
[+] [-] rrdharan|7 years ago|reply
I could swear when I dug into this I found that they had actually licensed out their dataset to a couple of hedge funds already that were doing exactly that (and paying for the privilege).
I can’t find this anymore, so maybe I am imagining things? At any rate this FT article implies there were people out there likely doing this though unclear if they paid Glassdoor for the privilege: https://www.ft.com/content/d86ad460-8802-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45...