A year after acquiring U.K.-based Breakroom, ZipRecruiter announced that it has launched the workplace ratings product in the United States, backed by more than 1 million U.S. employee ratings.
The Problem Breakroom Targets
Matt Plummer, Senior Vice President, Product Strategy & Enterprise Solutions at ZipRecruiter, says the core issue driving Breakroom’s U.S. push is candidate expectation-setting in frontline roles. As he put it, “There’s this aspect that’s been missing and that’s an informed candidate. A candidate who really understands the job that they’re applying to and the job that they might step into.” He added that employers see “challenges with first day showups, especially on the frontline workforce jobs, and you see challenges on the 90-day show up rate.”
ZipRecruiter is not the only one focusing on frontline talent. Long underserved by TA tech, these roles are suddenly in the spotlight as AI disrupts knowledge-worker hiring and companies are looking elsewhere for growth.
Breakroom vs. Glassdoor
Unlike Glassdoor, owned by Recruit, the parent company of Indeed, Plummer says Breakroom emphasizes structured inputs. Where Glassdoor has employees talking about how they feel about working at a company, Breakroom asks them primarily for yes/no and numerical responses.
Free-form reviews, he noted, “end up being highly subjective,” sometimes even influenced by consumers reacting to unrelated news about a company’s leadership.
Breakroom launched in the U.S. with over a million employer ratings, collected via quizzes promoted on social channels such as TikTok and Instagram.
Breakroom’s team of about 20 employees, along with the larger ZipRecruiter team, is currently A/B testing the integration of Breakroom data into ZipRecruiter job postings, with a full rollout planned for next month.
Monetization Plans
Breakroom remains in early U.S. rollout, and ZipRecruiter is not yet monetizing the service. According to Plummer, there are two opportunities for future monetization. The first is enhancing employer brand pages with selected rating data. The second is improving the effectiveness of existing products, such as job postings, by giving candidates a richer view of the company and job. In this context, Breakroom’s structured ratings aim to produce more informed applicants, which Plummer believes will help recruiters downstream.
Plummer also emphasized giving employers direct value from the dataset. “We can advise them on things to improve, things to consider doing better, things to consider in their pay rates, whatever it might be.”
ZipRecruiter reported Q2 results on August 11, 2025, posting revenue of $112.2 million and a net loss of $9.5 million. Revenue declined 9.2% year-over-year, with the company citing a soft labor market.
