So the big news in our world is that Recruit holdings who own Indeed bought Glassdoor for 1.2 billion greenbacks - so here's my hot take on it
1. Had no idea this was on the cards but it makes all sort of sense.
2. Indeed is hugely successful, expanding and effective but if it has weaknesses - it is that their audience is not as engaged as they want it to be (they may disagree but....) - that is their traffic get what they want from Indeed and move on quickly.
3. Indeed also have the small issue of Google taking them on - head on (Google is not anyone's idea of a competitor you want to have launch against you).
4. Glassdoor is a phenomenon - growing fast and a/the key engagement platform for jobseekers/employees (depending on sector). They have a very large global audience (47m Unique Users per month) and it is very engaged - (avg time on site 2 mins 40 seconds ) but....
5. I think Glassdoor are having greater difficulties monetising the platform than they had envisaged and certainly not as quickly as they would like. Converting this traffic into applications and clear tangible ROI that clients are happy to pay big money for is not an easy job.
I'm going to ignore the current take that they will be run as completely separate businesses etc - they all say that in year 1 - in year 2 not so much.....
So combine a hugely engaging platform with a hugely effective traffic driver and you get alchemy / magic / hyper growth / supercharged results
As we all know making it happen is not quite as simple but 100% get the logic and there will be some very clever people paid large amounts of money who will be charged with getting a return on that $1.2Bn!
