
Glassdoor has been acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2B - openmosix
https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17333912/glassdoor-acquisiton-recruit-holdings-1-2-billion
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kolz13
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.

~~~
rauhl
> 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’
…

~~~
WhyDoPeople
> 2018-05-09T14:33Z

You seem to be missing a value for Z

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

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pg_bot
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?

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

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

~~~
geezerjay
> GTA V made $7B.

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

> Minecraft was worth it.

To Notch it sure did.

~~~
ameister14
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.

~~~
geezerjay
> 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?

~~~
ameister14
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.

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dawhizkid
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)

~~~
TrainedMonkey
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>.

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

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rajacombinator
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 ...

~~~
cylinder
How do they make money off of this?

~~~
zuhayeer
ads

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kapilkale
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...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/japan-s-recruit-
buying-jobs-website-glassdoor-for-1-2-billion)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-
webs...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-website-
glassdoor-is-said-to-interview-banks-for-2018-ipo)

~~~
hunter23
where did you get the 7x revenue? I don't see that line in the article?

~~~
kapilkale
“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.”

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vthallam
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.

~~~
dhimes
Yelp for HR.

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px1999
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)?

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

~~~
px1999
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)

~~~
beamatronic
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.

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monkeydust
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.

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

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Zaheer
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](https://www.Levels.fyi)) with
Ads so far and done very well with SEO relatively but 1B is a different league
entirely.

~~~
bad_user
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.

~~~
Zaheer
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.

~~~
bad_user
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.

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joshjkim
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.

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jacquesm
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.

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sschueller
"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?

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

~~~
BlackDeath3
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.

~~~
icebraining
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 :)

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joering2
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?

~~~
thisisit
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.

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

~~~
mayniac
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.

~~~
conradfr
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.

~~~
mayniac
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.

~~~
bspn
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.

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

