The company-review and salary info site Glassdoor has raised another $20 million from venture capitalists led by DAG Ventures, some of which it’ll use to expand outside the U.S.
Already, almost 40% of site traffic comes from outside the U.S., even though “we’re not really trying, and we’re English only,” says CEO Robert Hohman. Glassdoor will likely expand into western Europe first, since it has a lot current customers there, ready to localize their information; this would lead the way to Glassdoor getting more local clients in the UK, France, and elsewhere.
Glassdoor has been raising money (around $42 million total) through the years, selling services to employers once it got a solid stable of job candidates coming its way, and then catching fire after hooking up with Facebook.
Unique visitors are up 160% over last year. It now has more than 14 million registered users, with a new one added every two seconds.
Glassdoor makes money a few different ways, some based on branding, others on more performance-based, transaction-oriented job hunting. On the branding side, an employer — let’s say UPS — can have a Glassdoor page, where it enhances what would otherwise be a basic listing, getting analytics about who’s visiting their jobs, where those people are located, and other companies they’re interested in.
There are also ads for jobs. So, say I go to LinkedIn and look for a job as a marketing director. Perhaps some company like VMware or Informatica, who have openings in marketing, will have bought an ad on that search results page. Or, ads are pulled in for marketing jobs through Glassdoor partners like Monster and Dice.
I asked Hohman what the company eventually plans on doing, like an IPO, hooking up with a larger outfit, or something else. “I love to be independent,” he says, “but who knows what the future holds?”
The present seems to be holding up OK for Glassdoor. Traffic is up about 160% over the past year, and revenue about 175 percent. It’s likely to use some of the new money for new hires, especially in sales. Its competitors include CareerBliss as well as non-U.S. outfits like InsideTrak. InsideTrak would like to be the Glassdoor of Australia; with this latest influx of money, Glassdoor, it sounds like, would like to be that as well.
