Job community website Glassdoor raises $20M

Money will be used to expand internationally, invest in new technology and hire talent

(Updated to reflect comment from Glassdoor)

Jobs and career community Glassdoor has raised a $20 million Series D round of financing, the company announced Wednesday.

The round, led by DAG Ventures, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Battery Ventures, brings Glassdoor's total raised to $42.2 million. 

The money raised will be used to accelerate the company’s development internationally, to invest in new data and recruitment technology, and to hire new talent.

"Our focus remains on our content, expanding internationally and continuing to build out the services both job seekers and employers demand of us. We can’t disclose future business plans, but we will be adding to our engineering and product development teams to meet these needs," Robert Hohman, co-founder and CEO of Glassdoor, said in an e-mail interview with VatorNews.

Sausalito, California-based Glassdoor was founded in 2007. The company says that it is growing fast, adding an average of a one new user every second. In just the past year, Glassdoor has grown 160%, to over 13 million monthly unique visitors, while revenue has grown 175%.

Around 40% of Glassdoor's monthly traffic comes from outside the United States, mostly from Canada, India, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Australia and Singapore. That is a 20% increase from a year ago.

Glassdoor says it has data on over 220,000 companies in more than 190 countries, with 14 million plus registered users. The companies represented on the include all of those on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500.

While there are obviously plenty of job recruitment websites out there, what Hohman says sets it apart is its employee generated content, which includes informations about what it is really like to work at a company. This includes anonymous salaries, company reviews and interview questions, which are posted by employees, job seekers, and the companies themselves. 

"Glassdoor pairs together the latest job listings along with employee-generated company reviews and ratings, salary reports, interview questions, office photos and more, while allowing job seekers to uncover who they know on the inside of companies they’re interested in working at through their Facebook network," Hohman said.

"For employers, Glassdoor offers a variety of unique social recruiting solutions, allowing employers to participate in this conversation in their own words and speak directly to the candidates already researching their jobs and company culture on Glassdoor. Employers can also target the candidates that matter most to them with specific job ads on the pages of their competitors"

Glassdoor also has its JobScope technology, which integrates this employee-generated content into job listings, and Inside Connections, which allows users to sign into Glassdoor using their Facebook account information and then immediately see where their friends work.

"Glassdoor is all about workplace transparency. We strive to give job seekers an inside look into a specific job at a specific company to help people make more informed career decisions. We are proud to say that Glassdoor is changing the way people search for jobs and companies recruit and retain talent," Hohman said.

Glassdoor generates revenue through three key means: display ads, job listings and subscriptions, Hohman said. 

Through its geographic-targeted advertising, Glassdoor helps  employers and job aggregators reach top talent. The company also offers both a free and a paid job listings services for employers, recruiters and jobs sites.

Glassdoor also makes money from subscriptions through enhanced employer profiles and Facebook profiles, which start at $500 a month, and vary depending on employee size, and the amount of traffic to Glassdoor.

The future is bright for the employment recruitment business, Hohman says

"We have just begun to scratch the surface of the opportunity we see in jobs and employment globally, as current estimated spending in the HR industry to attract and retain talent is approximately $94B, according to IDC. We are operating within the industry from two sides. We help employers find top talent through branding and social recruiting, and we also help job seekers and employees get the inside scoop on jobs and companies through company ratings and reviews, interview questions and reviews, salary information, interview questions and more."

The recruiting tools market

Job recruitment is a market that is growing fast, with numerous other companies occupying the same space, and raising money.

Entelo, a search engine for employers to find suitable recruits to fill positions in their companies, came out of stealth mode earlier this month.

The company offers two products, Entelo Sonar and Entelo Search.

Sonar identifies candidates who are likely to be looking for a new job. Entelo determines this based on over 70 different variables, including if the person has recently updated their social profiles, moves within the company they are working for and earnings announcements.

Search contains a database of over 300 million profiles, with information aggregated from social and professional communities such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Quora, Dribbble, GrabCad and other websites. Bischke says that Search operate in a similar manner to Google and other search engines: it pulls data that is already public to create a profile.

BranchOut, a free service that allowed Facebook users to create a professional account that pulled work-relevant information from their profile and allowed them to search for available jobs or company connections, debuted a new tool last year called RecruiterConnect. It was designed to help companies and other professionals search, through BranchOut's connection to Facebook, to find viable candidates.

There is also Zao, an Israeli-based start-up which helps employers manage referral programs and hire quality staff. The company announced in June that it raised $1.3 million in funding from Oren Zeev, founding partner at Orens Capital and former General Partner at Apax Partners.

Then there is TalentBin,  which started off as Honestly.com, which was launched a couple years ago with $1.2 million in funding back in May 2010 from First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures. In July 2011 it became TalentBin, while it still had more than $600,000 in the bank.

TalentBin searches websites such as Twitter, Quora, GitHub to find implicit activities of engineers and other technical workers. By doing so, TalentBin can aggregate a fuller picture of a person that is not reflected in, say, a LinkedIn profile. The company moved out of private beta in May. 

Last month, social recruitment company Work4 Labs debuted an expanded suite of products for companies to recruit workers off of Facebook. In addition, it also announced that it raised $11 million in Series A funding.

The company uses social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help businesses recruit people to come work for them. The app gets permission to scan a users Facebook profile for education and work history. It then matches job openings from its clients to any openings that user may be qualified for.

Glassdoor could not be reached for comment.