Indeed, Dice, and Monster, oh my!

Although the job board and recruitment marketing industry is sizable – estimated at $22 billion worldwide – most of the companies involved are privately held. So when the few publicly held sites put out their quarterly reports, industry observers scrutinize them, trying to extract trends – any trend! – from the data. Results are out from several players, including DHI, Recruit, and Randstad. What do they say?

Recruit Holdings: Recruit – which includes both Indeed and Glassdoor – just released its Q3 results. No surprise here – the numbers were good. Revenue was up 3.6% overall, driven by the two big job boards. Recruit has long dominated the staffing world, and it was the staffing companies that saw a revenue drop of 3.3%. This was offset by a 28.6% increase in the HR Technology segment – which includes Indeed and Glassdoor. This trend of overall growth driven by significant increases in the job board revenue has been going on since…well, since Recruit acquired the two sites. At least for Recruit, job boards are not dead – not even close.

DHI Group: DHI, which includes Dice, eFinancialCareers, and ClearanceJobs, saw a 1% increase in revenue during Q4 from the preceding quarter. Dice’s revenue was up from Q3, but down 3% year over year. eFinancialCareers, which has a strong UK and European presence, saw a quarterly drop of 4%, and a year over year drop of 6% – both attributed to slowdowns in recruiting in the UK and Europe. ClearanceJobs saw growth of 5% quarterly, and 16% year over year. EBITDA margin was up, to 23%. So a mixed bag, but Dice showing a return to growth after some slow times. DHI continues to focus sales effort on clients generating $5000 or more per year. No explosive growth – but growth nonetheless.

Randstad: Randstad, which competes with Recruit as one of the largest staffing firms, saw revenue drop by 3% for Q4. Much of this was from drops in staffing revenue in Europe and the U.S., but Monster also saw a drop of 16%. The job board’s decrease came after another drop of 15% in Q3. The one area of improvement was in gross margin. Perhaps the life or death of job boards is more specific to particular sites, rather than the industry as a whole?

The Australian job board giant SEEK won’t be reporting financial results until next summer, but the 2019 results were impressive – up 18% for the year. LinkedIn (which I and many employers consider a job board) continues to prosper inside the Microsoft nest, and StepStone – part of Axel Springer – made waves last July when it purchased a majority share of Appcast. Of the top job board companies listed by Staffing Industry Analysts, only CareerBuilder seems to be dissolving itself.

Food for thought. Indeed, Dice, and Monster, oh my indeed!

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