How does Glassdoor make money?

Glassdoor charges recruiters to post jobs, and advertise their companies on the site

The last time I had to look for a job was all the way back in 2012, when I first moved to California. I was living in a motel, without a job, and I spent months refreshing Craigslist every hour seeing if I could find something to do where I could make some money. I figured there had to be a better way than that, even back then.

Turns out, there was. Since I've been doing this job I have talked to numerous companies in the recruiting space, all trying to make it easier for people to find the perfect job.

One of the most well known of these companies is jobs and recruitment sites Glassdoor.

What sets the San Francisco-based company apart from other job recruitment websites out there is its employee generated content, which includes information 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. The site aims to give the complete picture of what it means to work somewhere, not just from the perspective of the person offering the job. Plus Glassdoor is now the fastest growing job site when compared to LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster and CareerBuilder, and has also beat out CareerBuilder for several consecutive months in terms of job seeker traffic.

While Glassdoor is completely free for the job seekers, the company makes its money from the recruiter side of the business.

Recruiters can advertise their jobs and promote their brand through either subscription offering or on a cost per click basis.

For a subscription fee, which starts at $8,000 for 12 months, employers can build out enhanced profiles, which allows employers to promote open jobs, add insights into what makes the company unique and describe the company culture, add office photos and company videos, incorporate the company blog, and post the latest company updates directly on Glassdoor and incorporate a direct feed from company Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as direct from a company blog.

Budgets for employers can fluctuate based on their individual needs. For example, Glassdoor has a few multinational corporations that have signed up, and so it has rolled out the ability to have localized enhanced profiles to various countries where the company is looking to hire. So if a company would like to make sure to recruit people in the U.S., Germany, France and the Netherlands, for example, it would cost them $7,000 extra per month for each language of the profile.

Glassdoor does off free employer accounts as well, which allows any employers to sign up, and be able to respond to reviews, or flag them if they believe them to be inaccurate. It also gives them access an Employer Center, which gives an official company representative tools to update basic profile information, and access to insights and analytics that help employers understand their brand's reputation and its affect on their recruiting efforts.

The company is seeing roughly 3,000 employers signing up for this every month. 

Glassdoor also makes money from a series of job advertising products, which can run on either a subscription or cost per click basis. For example, on CPC, an employer can say that they have $1,000 and that they would like to recruit for a certain positions until their budget runs out.

It also offers jobs slot, a more traditional mechanism, where recruiters can post several job listings, which will be priced based on their individual needs. Pricing starts at $700 for 12 months. And the company offers a job posting product, which is targeted at recruiters at small businesses or hiring managers at larger companies, where they post up to 5 open jobs, and which starts at $99 for 30 days.

And, finally, Glassdoor makes money from traditional display advertising.

Launched in 2008, Glassdoor now has more than 30 million members worldwide, who have submitted millions of user-generated reviews, ratings, salary reports and more on 400,000 companies..

Glassdoor also partners with more than 2,100 employer clients, including General Mills, Cigna, Dell, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Facebook, HP, Intuit, Procter & Gamble and Twitter.

The company has raised $160 million in venture funding, including a $70 million funding round in January of this year.

(Image source: employers.glassdoor.com)