Surprised no one has mention it yet, but Recruit Holdings is the parent company of Indeed.<p>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.<p>Indeed/Recruit has made several big acquisitions in the past year including SimplyHired and Workopolis.<p>Note: I founded/work at a startup in the same space.
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.<p>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?
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)<p>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)
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 ...
Glassdoor was valued at ~7X revenue [1], and was growing ~30% YoY [2].<p>This means they were doing ~$170M top-line, up from $130M in the year prior.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/japan-s-recruit-buying-jobs-website-glassdoor-for-1-2-billion" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/japan-s-r...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-website-glassdoor-is-said-to-interview-banks-for-2018-ipo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-26/jobs-webs...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>I'm really surprised that it took 800 people and $200m to build.<p>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...<p>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.<p>I wonder if their monetization strategy will follow the same path, squeeze companies for cash (likely to remove reviews)?
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 (<a href="https://www.Levels.fyi" rel="nofollow">https://www.Levels.fyi</a>) 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.<p>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?
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?