Glassdoor has been acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2B (opens in new tab)

>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.

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

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

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).

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

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 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.

> 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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

How do they make money off of this?

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.

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>.

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

perhaps such companies make people sign strict NDAs

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.

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

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

Yelp for HR.

HR related SaaS is a massive market.

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.

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