Glassdoor Secures $40 Million In Funding From T. Rowe Price

June 9, 2016 – Glassdoor, a job and recruiting marketplace, has closed a $40 million investment round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates. Existing investors Battery Ventures, Google Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures and Tiger Global also participated in the round. The company has raised approximately $200 million since it was founded in 2007.

While best known for its proprietary user-generated content, Glassdoor has grown to be one of the largest job aggregation engines. It offers job listings combined with an array of workplace insights, including company ratings and reviews, CEO approval ratings, detailed pay data by job title, interview reviews, benefits reviews and office photos. Glassdoor currently has 30 million monthly unique users and data on more than 540,000 companies spanning 190 countries.

Glassdoor competes with LinkedIn and Indeed, the job search site purchased by Recruit Holdings Co. in 2012. The company notes that it is similar to TripAdvisor because both sell to larger enterprises, in Glassdoor’s case to companies that want to sponsor pages on the site and buy ads to promote job openings to potential hires.

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About 40 percent of the Fortune 500 are currently Glassdoor clients. Companies leveraging Glassdoor to manage their employer brands and influence candidates include Chevron, Cigna, Dell, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Groupon, HP, Intuit, Procter & Gamble and Twitter.

This new financing will support Glassdoor’s continued growth and investments in product, marketing, and people around the globe, according to internal sources at the company.

A Shift In How to Recruit Talent

“We believe that Glassdoor is fundamentally changing the way job seekers search for jobs and companies recruit talent,” said Henry Ellenbogen, portfolio manager of T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund,. “Their unique user-generated data includes millions of reviews, which increases transparency in recruiting. Our view is that Glassdoor is executing well, and it can be a much larger company over time.”

“We’re delighted to add T. Rowe Price to our incredible investor roster, as they bring significant experience with late-stage, high-growth companies such as ours and a long-term focus,” said Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman. Mr. Hohman co-founded the company along with Zillow co-founder Rich Barton.

“Regardless of where you live, where you work matters and the level of transparency Glassdoor has brought to the market is helping people everywhere find a job and company they love and, in turn, helping employers attract high-quality candidates.”

Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, told The Wall Street Journal that one reason his firm remains bullish on Glassdoor is because Millennials seek more information when they are making career decisions. Millennials make up the largest generation of potential job seekers. Before Glassdoor, “if you were flying out to Seattle to interview with Microsoft, you could find out more information about your hotel than about the company you’re interviewing with,” he said.

Glassdoor’s ‘post-money’ valuation edged higher from a year ago when it was worth close to $1 billion. While the price of Glassdoor’s shares fell 6.3 percent, to $8 from $8.54 from the company’s previous round of funding, the company has outperformed shares of publicly-traded LinkedIn, which have fallen 37 percent in the same period.

An Expanding Field

Glassdoor’s rise comes at a time when one of the original entrants in the space, Monster, continues to falter. Nearly four years into its rebranding effort, Monster’s shares closed yesterday at $2.84. A year ago, they were trading at $5.73. In its most recent quarter, Monster posted a revenue decrease of nine percent compared to a year ago. For 2015, the company recorded a revenue loss of eight percent.

In addition to job seekers turning to alternative social media sites liked LinkedIn and Facebook, another company has been launched to serve the higher paying job market. Not Actively Looking made its debut last year in the U.K. as a global matchmaking platform for senior executives and executive search firms. The service allows executives to discreetly manage and update their CV for the benefit of executive search firms they hand pick. For recruiters, the service gives access to senior level professionals, whether they are actively engaged in a job search or not.

Search firms currently signed up with Not Actively’s platform include Calibre One, Polachi, Fairfield Partners, Coleman Lew + Associates, Ridgeway Partners, DHR International, 680 Partners, Lochlin Partners, Greenwich Harbor Partners, Hobbs & Towne, Park Square Executive Search, Kensington International, The Miles Partnership, Norman Broadbent, SIMA International, Warren Partners, Marlin Hawk, Spengler Fox, Osprey Clarke, Barracuda Group, Ward Howell International, Horton International, Signium, Archer Mann, Stanton Chase International, Wilton & Bain, Directorbank, TRANSEARCH, and Renovata Partners. The company recently completed a private fund raising of more than £400,000, or the U.S. equivalent of nearly $600,000.

Investors continue to pour money into new recruiting and HR tools as the whole field expands. Here is a look at recent funding secured by these companies:

• Invenias, a U.K.-headquartered global cloud-based platform for executive and strategic hiring, secured $2.8 million in funding. The financing package includes $1.1 million in new funding from existing investor MMC Ventures, supported by $1.7 million in debt funding from Clydesdale & Yorkshire Banks. The funding will be used to help the firm execute on its international growth plans as well as invest in R&D and support its expanding customer base;

• CoreHR, a provider of cloud-based human capital management and payroll software, recently received an investment from JMI Equity, a growth equity firm focused on investing in software and services companies, and JMI Services LLC, which is the family investment company of John J. Moores;

• Randstad Holding confirmed it is leading a seed financing in Focus Orange Technology. The investment is centered around the development of Crunchr, Focus Orange’s analytics platform. Crunchr collects, validates and consolidates people data into meaningful insights around strategic workforce planning, succession, talent management and employee preferences;

• Talentsoft, a global, privately held leader for cloud-based talent management solutions, completed a funding round of $27 million. The round was led exclusively by Goldman Sachs’ merchant banking division. The new funding is being used to support Talentsoft’s strategic international growth.

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief, Hunt Scanlon Media