Why Did Indeed Acquire Resume.com?

Historically, Indeed’s acquisitions make a lot of sense. Adding Simply Hired, Interview, and Workopolis are pretty easy to justify. Same thing for Recruit Holdings, Indeed’s parent company, which recently added Glassdoor to the arsenal. The recent news that Indeed had acquired Resume.com, however, is a little tougher for me to wrap my head around.

But first the news.

About 3.5 million job hunters visit Resume.com monthly. That translates into 40,000 resumes a week being posted. Pretty impressive for a company that launched less than five years ago. Indeed will continue to operate the site and enable job seekers to build, download, and print personalized resumes. However, this service will now be free, where there was previously a fee.

“Resume.com provides job seekers with a vital resume service and career tools to aid in their job search,” said Raj Mukherjee, SVP of Product at Indeed. “We’re excited to add this site to Indeed’s offerings as it aligns perfectly with our mission of helping people get jobs.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Resume.com employees will join Indeed, and the organization will continue to operate out of Vancouver, Canada.

OK, now to the why? Forty-thousand resumes a week is no joke, but Indeed gets plenty of resumes already. There’s nothing special with Resume.com’s brand or its technology. It’s tough to see why Indeed made this move, but here are some possibilities:

Keep it out of someone else’s hands. Rumor has it that Indeed went hard to acquire Canadian job board Workopolis because ZipRecruiter wanted it too. Keeping ZipRecruiter out of Canada was worth it. Maybe this move was similar.
Google. It’s likely that we’ll see Google become a sourcing tool, giving employers access to resumes from around the web. With sites such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor likely to block their profiles from Google’s bots, Resume.com may have been a site willing to play with Google, giving it nearly 4 million records. With Indeed owning the site, Google can say goodbye to this content resource.
The price was right. I doubt this deal ended up in a bidding war. Maybe Indeed just threw out a number and a “couple of unemployed guys” couldn’t believe this luck and jumped at the chance to ring the register.
SEO. Thanks to Google for Jobs, getting job search traffic is getting tougher and more expensive for Indeed. However, searches around writing a resume or resume tips aren’t owned by Google, and maybe Resume.com is killing the organic search game.
Acqui-hire. Maybe Resume.com is a company loaded with rock stars and hidden gems that made an acquisition more about bringing in the talent into Indeed than it did the parts and pieces.

It’s likely we’ll never know all the reasons Indeed bit on this opportunity, but they certainly must’ve felt confident about the deal. One thing is for sure, however: Google’s entry into the employment space has lit a fire under the braintrust at Recruit Holdings and Indeed.