Glassdoor has been acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2B | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor has been acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2B

recode.net

205 pointsopenmosix116 comments

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.

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?

Sure it's ckolmar at zippia dot com

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.

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

> 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’ …

> 2018-05-09T14:33Z

You seem to be missing a value for Z

No, that's valid. "Z is the zone designator for the zero UTC offset."

Placing a timezone designator after Z is invalid under ISO 8601 [0]; you are thinking of any of the plus, minus or hyphen symbols, which do require values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_zone_designators

The article didn't mention it earlier or I missed it and no one in the thread had brought it up.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recruit_scandal

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?

You didn't factor in current user data and potential user data. That's worth something these days.

I don't get shocked anymore after learning Microsoft paid 2 billion for Minecraft.

GTA V made $7B. Minecraft was worth it.

> GTA V made $7B.

According to Google, Minecraft made $23M up to 2011.

> Minecraft was worth it.

To Notch it sure did.

According to Google, Minecraft made $23M up to 2011.

2011? In 2011 Minecraft was a very new product compared to where it is now. What Microsoft was purchasing there was a pre-existing virtual world software that already many kids were familiar and comfortable with. It's a world where there's no significant level of concern about inappropriate avatars, and nobody really cares. It's a world focused on construction and design, not on killing off everyone else so that you can be the last survivor. As VR gets better over the next decade, it would be entirely feasible for something based on a Minecraft like world to be a solid base for corporate and educational markets.

Why are you bringing up Minecraft revenue for just 2011? It grew like crazy.

> Why are you bringing Minecraft revenue for just 2011?

It's not revenue "for just 2011".

It's revenue up to 2011.

Does that really change much? Minecraft still grew a ton more and is still a big game. Microsoft also got to use overseas money to pay for it.

Sure, and its revenue in 2012 was $128 million, and 2013 was $326 million.

Suddenly paying $2.5 Billion in late 2014 starts to make some sense.

> Suddenly paying $2.5 Billion in late 2014 starts to make some sense.

You mean expecting that a game that's already a half a dozen years old will keep increasing its revenue for a decade straight?

Does that make any sense whatsoever?

No, I mean expecting that a game of this type that has more than doubled in revenue for the past two years to continue to be profitable makes sense. As it turns out, this was an excellent bet, as their next quarters saw revenue increases in the hundreds of millions.

Two years later, they continued to increase sales of the game, selling about 20 million copies in 2016.

It worked.

Why are you shocked about that?

1) It's targeted to a really broad audience 2) It has a profitable but affordable pricetag 3) The grafics still look good and will continue to do so 4) Microsoft has three big platforms where it runs

Minecraft is an amazing ecosystem. $2B is nothing. I think it's one of the best Microsoft's acquisition ever.

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..

I would get maybe 100 out of that 800 are Engineers/Software/SRE. The rest is BI, Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Management, HR, and so on.

Recruit Holdings is focused on the Job/HR space, so this acquisition makes sense to further fend off Linkedin and Google.

They have a massive sales team. Hundreds of people on it.

If their revenue comes from ads, a lot of those 800 employees are probably their sales force and customer support.

I know it's a larger scale, but if an indy podcast developer can develop his own ad platform just for his application does it really take that large of a team?

https://marco.org/2016/09/09/overcast-ads

Selling and serving ads takes a lot of work. I worked at a 50ish person company, and we had 3 people working full time on selling ads, along with my 4 person product/engineering team who probably spent about 50% of our time working on our ads platform/integrating with other company's platforms. There's a lot of complexity in this space, especially when trying to optimize for a global market and making sure you keep customers happy.

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.

Recruit Holdings also owns Indeed- who is making a strong push into Recruiting.

Not just recruiting, but evaluation and screening as well. Most people here are probably only looking for high-paying white collar jobs but Indeed does a huge business in front-line and blue collar postings. Now they're offering screening between application and in-person interviews and can take care of a lot of the filtering work that used to mean a huge pile of resumes. I see the GD purchase as breadth while they're also moving up & down the HR pipeline simultaneously.

Recruit is kind of a funny setup - itself it's not that large (I think around 800 people) but it owns/controls companies totaling tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

>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.

I've noticed that in your evaluation there wasn't a single mention of revenue, income or even market share.

It boggles the mind how a $1B takeover can be described as reasonable while paying absolurely no attention to very basic performance indicators.

Has the world learned nothing from the dot com bubble?

Look at Recruit’s existing line of business and revenue. The bigger question, to me, is what happens if Google decides two sites dominating their organic listings is not welcome.

Massive backlash, claims of bias, lobbying and negative PR pieces, and more than likely regulations would then follow, putting at least a sizeable damper on their business and an unforeseen impact on future business. Companies with millions of dollars available to them will not go down without a fight.

So froogle/shopping.google all over again? I think Google made the change in 2012[1] with no meaningful backlash in the US and a fine in the EU they are appealing. So I think the lesson is that Goog can do whatever they like with job searches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Shopping

My whole point is that any revenue from Glassdoor is meaningless and irrelevant. Their data is so valuable to the current business of a company that runs multiple recruiting firms that it's just a cost of doing business for them.

> My whole point is that any revenue from Glassdoor is meaningless and irrelevant.

That's the same tired old logic that brought the world the Myspace and Yahoo deal.

It’s ads and shaking down companies to subscribe. Their data is likely to be very valuable.

Money is fiction, rich people understand that and embrace it, poor people do not.

Yep, it sure is fascinating!

Much of the world prefers riding the bubble to FOMO. The frothier it gets, the less need for and meaning held by useful indicators. It's human nature :/

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 think the price was too high. However this is without the knowledge of the size of the operation, or their sales numbers. I think a lot of people are going overboard with the data is the new oil philosophy, as the rate in which data is being generated is growing exponentially. Since the supply of information has increased so much one would reason that its value should be decreasing, not increasing. (Presuming that there is no uniqueness or monopoly of the type of data)

Another HN commenter mentioned their sales numbers at $170M and growing at 30% annually. Why do you think a $1.2B price is high? it seems pretty reasonable for me. Buying at 7x total sales with a 30% growth rate seems like a normal purchase price.

I didn't see that until after I posted the previous comment. That number certainly changes the conversation, however I'm usually a fan of valuing companies via net profit instead of revenue. Although I will admit that valuing startups is a whole different ballgame than traditional companies.

It's very hard to value most companies that are at this stage on net profit because most of them are just breaking profitablity (so their net profit will be 0). Basically if you valued companies on net profit you would never acquired a startup (since most of them are unprofitable). Thus, they tend to use other financial metrics (including total sales) and also build a business operating plan to ensure the company can move to profitablity. This is the case for all companies in the early stage (it's not something new to the internet age).

The expected path for startups is: 1) find product market fit 2) build growth 3) build revenue 4) move to a sustainable operating model where at least your gross margins are positive 5) move to cash profitability 6) congrats you've made it and now are a normal sustainable company

Glassdoor was on step #4 and was probably close to #5. Valuing based on net profit would only work on companies in step #6.

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.

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)

perhaps such companies make people sign strict NDAs

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>.

Our company encouraged us to leave reviews... What a bad idea. Every new review was absolutely terrible, as expected.

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.

also a rush of reviews could mean that there was a downsizing

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.

I usually don't post reviews, good or bad, on Glassdoor, because I can just imagine the fallout of a data breech/hack which would end up doxing a ton of old disgruntled employees.

I don't think Glassdoor has very stringent identity checks (a problem in itself), so I imagine most posters are using throwaway email accounts to shield themselves from any fallout.

How do they make money off of this?

ads

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

That site is missing a lot of data still it seems.

What kind of data would you like to see?

The data on staff engineer salaries at Google seems very off. The total comp for staff is $580K with a breakdown of total comp with being a 200K base, a 200K bonus, and 172K of stock. I would be surprised if the average staff engineer gets a bonus that is at 100% of their salary level. I guess this is the issue with user submitted data.

You could add h1 salary info (which is publicly available) to improve accuracy on the base compensation portion.

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.

> I worked in a company office of a company that was based aboot 200 miles away and our experiences were a lot different from each other.

Glassdoor lets users filter reviews based on company location, which appears to take care of that problem.

Hear! Hear!

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.

Glassdoor was valued at ~7X revenue [1], and was growing ~30% YoY [2].

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...

where did you get the 7x revenue? I don't see that line in the article?

“Looking for jobs through employer reviews is becoming more popular, so buying Glassdoor not only grabs more users but also strengthens Recruit’s existing HR platform,” said Yushi Kawamoto, analyst at Haitong International Japaninvest KK. “Recruit is paying about seven times sales, which isn’t high. This will boost their competitiveness. So overall this is positive for Recruit.”

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.

Yelp for HR.

HR related SaaS is a massive market.

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)?

Acquirer is paying for the community, not the easy to replicate tech. There were lots of image sharing apps, but only one Instagram.

What community though? There are three groups that use the site - employers, employees who want to vent and job seekers.

The first are captive, the second only allowed to post once per year, and the third is ideally a very temporary situation.

It's hardly comparable to a social network, or even other review sites (which can cater for enthusiasts)

I think you've just answered your own question. Post limits don't change the value of the information submitted, not does people looking for work change the value of their talent to potential employers.

It's not comparable to a social network because it is a social network: people and relationships and they're nodes and vertices on a social graph.

There is gold in what you just wrote. These groups had a need to connect socially, anonymously, and in a way that is urgent and temporary.

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.

Glassdoor has always been a valuable tool in a job hunt, so the price isn't so surprising.

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.

I don't know how they evaluated GlassDoor, but I would've bet the price is high as GlassDoor is basically an untapped gold mine for sales people.

Sales people = recruiters? Or simply their display advertising? There's several channels to do the latter. The former there are also several channels though I agree they have a very targeted audience.

No, not recruiters.

If you'll take a look at those reviews, people bitch and moan about real problems they are having at work.

E.g. one immediate signal would be "cramped office space". Other problems that come to mind are communication or management issues.

You can also take the pulse of a company by how happy or disgruntled the employees are. You can basically predict upscaling or downscaling of a company by such signals.

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.

"A man looking for a job in real life, not on Glassdoor." This caption on the picture seems odd to me. Is Glassdoor not a real job hunting platform?

"Real life" means "not on a computer". See also "IRL".

I find this distinction increasingly odd as time goes on. Or, at the very least, the use of the phrase "real life", as if interactions over the Internet are somehow cleanly separated from the rest of one's interactions.

According to the Wiki, some people in the past also objected and preferred the term AFK, but nowadays with smartphones and tablets, that seems increasingly obsolete as well :)

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 assume they make money from either advertising jobs or commission on jobs they place someone in. Pretty much the same as LinkedIn, except more targeted to people looking for the jobs and without also providing a platform for recruiters to cut them out.

> How they ever made any money?? What was their business model?

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...

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.

Glassdoor is hopelessly spammed by HR departments, “Advice to management: none, they are wonderful!” and so on.

This exactly.

I worked for one company where everyone who left started posting bad reviews. The next thing you know people who were still there were posting wonderful reviews and getting an "official response" from the company.

My old company did that. PR sent an email to all staff saying "please leave us a good review on Glassdoor". I checked and the week before four new reviews had come up, all using the same writing style, all incredibly positive. Stuff like "negatives: you have to do lots of hours, but you're paid well so I don't mind" (spoiler alert: only half of that sentence was truthful).

I reported all of them to Glassdoor and sent them the PR email, the reviews are still up months later.

edit: just checked again and everyone left fairly truthful 1* reviews in a short period of time a few weeks after I left, I'm guessing they did another round of "please leave positive reviews" and it backfired.

And for some reason these are the one that are displayed by the default "relevant" filter and the upvoted (more nuanced or critical) one are hidden.

Just checked and yup, all the planted five star reviews are at the top despite having no more than one "helpful" reports. Negative reviews with up to ten "helpful" reports are on at least page two. This is while sorting by "popular".

Seems to have taken the opposite strategy of Yelp, which bumps one star reviews to the top and makes companies pay to hide them. Or my ex-company is already paying, it's hard to tell.

Are they an "engaged employer" in the top right corner? If they are, my theory is that translates to "paying customer" hence the weighting given to the positive reviews.

Yes, they are. That theory makes a lot of sense tbh

Isn’t that just because they only want reviews from current or former employees, not prospective ones?

No, they solicit reviews from candidates and interns too.

That's my suspicion as well. Years ago I consulted for an agency that was full of negative reviews on GlassDoor, I noticed each time I checked back every few months that a huge number of the previous negative reviews would be gone and their rating would be higher.

In my experience, Glassdoor is highly motivated to investigate and potentially remove reviews due to complaints from companies paying them, and puts little to no effort into removing reviews due to complaints from everyone else.

I won't go as far as to say that they remove reviews purely on request, but I've seen removals due to requests that were based on what I felt was a pretty shaky justification.

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...

Would not surprise me given the current obsession by HF to find value in alternative data. Would be interested if you find details.

The most valuable insights from this would be to get trickled insider information. Once in a while a comment gives you an insight that is not currently available elsewhere. Like unannounced layoff rounds. Statements about employee fluctuation? Reading reviews by software engineers gives you and insight about how this co is executing its IT projects.. etc.

https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/how-investors-use-g...

Yes, they offer their dataset to companies as a paid service.

Source: my prior company paid for their entire data set and I personally used in a data science project.

> my prior company paid for their entire data se

Are you aware of how expensive that kind of data set would be? Also curious on what any company would do with that kind of data. Predict which company employees are the happiest?

Advertising jobs - it's quite an expensive option, but a lot of the bigger companies do post there as part of their rec ads mix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com