Dive Brief:
- Tokyo-based Recruit Holdings Co., a fast-growing HR services firm and parent company of Indeed, the online job and recruiting site, is acquiring SimplyHired, a smaller but relatively mature online recruiting site, according to Chris Russell, a recruiting technology consultant with RecTech Media.
- Coming just one day after rumors about an imminent SimplyHired sale (on or about June 26), Russell told SHRM that he learned about the new buyer Thursday.
- While SimplyHired ranks among the top career sites, Russell said it will most likely become "backfill for Indeed’s listings, adding a few more percentage points to their already large market share when it comes to source of hire."
Dive Insight:
“The largest job site in the world just got a little bit bigger,” Russell wrote in his blog post. He called Recruit Holdings "a very active buyer" of HR tech, staffing firms and other related entities. "Few others in the online recruiting space could’ve afforded to buy SimplyHired. … One wonders if other aggregators could be on Recruit’s radar.”
Jeff Dickey-Chasins, a job board and career site consultant at the Job Board Doctor, told SHRM that Indeed's decision was a defensive strategy, taking away a potential acquisition for the competition. But he doubts that the deal represents a new cycle aggregator consolidation.
Ethan Bloomfield, co-founder of ConversationDriver, a cloud-based service that connects technology vendors to clients, speculates that costs could rise for recruiters and employers, citing the "cost of a click on Google which can be as much as $20 or $30 for some key words.”
At this point, there has been no official announcement of the career site mega-deal.
