Dive Brief:

• Job board company Indeed and employer review site Glassdoor are working together to develop combined recruiting solutions, according to a July 21 announcement. The partnership will involve re-aligning sales and service models, including a co-branded employment branding bundle.
• "[C]lients can now access job seeker audiences across both Glassdoor and Indeed through Indeed's job advertising products and Indeed Hire," Glassdoor said. "Later this year, clients will be able to access reviews and ratings from Glassdoor and Indeed, all in one place."
• The two organizations are both owned by Recruit Holdings, a public corporation from Japan, although "both maintain distinct brand identities," according to Glassdoor's FAQ.

Dive Insight:

Recruit Holdings acquired Indeed in 2012 and made a couple of smaller acquisitions, such as SimplyHired in 2016 and Interviewed in 2017, before buying Glassdoor in 2018. As the online recruiting services market grew increasingly competitive after Randstad acquired Monster and Microsoft bought LinkedIn, while Google and Facebook also entered the fray, the Japanese firm appeared poised to become a player in the North American market.

"Basically, Indeed just bought Glassdoor," Sarah Brennan, CEO of Accelir and HCM industry analyst, wrote for HR Tech Blog at the time. 

As a result of the announced partnership, Glassdoor's data will be folded into Indeed's suite of recruiting solutions and its job board will offer Indeed customers another platform to increase their reach. This may create complications, recruiting technologists say.

"Indeed now has more control over visibility and driving applications," Graham Thornton, founder and CEO of Change State, told HR Dive via email. "It sounds like companies will not have the ability to decide which platform they'd like to send jobs. This will all be decided by the Indeed algorithm. What does this mean? You better have your tracking set up properly today if you want to know your ROI tomorrow."

In June, Glassdoor announced that entry-level job postings were down 68% from the same time last year. Overall, the company's job board "struggled to drive applicants in volume on their platform," Thornton said, noting the complexity this may create for recruiting marketers.

"The reality is most recruiters were not living in Glassdoor or sourcing candidates from within their platform. If executed cleanly — and all applications are either delivered to a company's ATS or within Indeed — there will be minimal disruption on the advertising front."

While Glassdoor is best known for its reviews, Indeed also has overlapping information in reviews of its own. This may present another challenge in this developing partnership, Thornton said.

"On the employer branding side, it's going to be interesting to see how the two companies combine reviews," Thornton explained. "Both properties have some questions around duplicate reviews and transparency, and now you're working on combining thousands of company reviews into one rating? That's not easy."

Elsewhere in the world of HR services and technology, Willis Towers Watson and Aon announced a merger earlier this year in a $30 billion deal and Kronos merged with Ultimate Software seeking "enhanced scale and an even stronger position in the fast-growing HCM marketplace."