The nightmare of the big factory begins with the pulse

Written by Xue Yongwei, author of "Finance and Economics Weekly"

Editor/ Dong Yuqing

In the vein, the characteristics of popular posts are all the same. There are big factory labels, plus some conflicting elements, which can stir people's nerves. Then it will be screenshotted, disseminated for secondary dissemination, spread to more platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, and eventually spread in the circle of employees in large factories. This situation often gives headaches to people in charge of public relations business in large factories. But in fact, the pulse itself is also distressed by empty traffic and the inability to realize.

Seeing that it was still the same three-piece set of renting, friendship and climbing, Su Jing, a bored employee of the big factory, withdrew from the intranet that was "strictly controlled" by HR and brushed her pulse. It's a platform for socializing in the workplace, and it's a place she and her colleagues frequent. The last time it was through the pulse that she knew that the company was about to cut down a project. Surrounded by the "high wall" of the airtight factory, she also wanted to find a quick exit.

In the daily life of employees of Internet factories, the presence of the pulse is very strong: watching gossip, criticizing the leadership together, or understanding new career opportunities can be completed in the pulse. This has made the pulse harvest huge traffic at the same time, but also from the big factory criticism. In the eyes of the person in charge of the relevant work, the public relations of the big factory, the pulse is a headache position. In particular, Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Kuaishou, Didi and other big manufacturers are regular customers of the Pulse Job Talk Area (formerly anonymous area).

However, despite the popularity in the Internet circle, the value-added services that the company can provide have always been limited, which to some extent also limits its imagination space for commercialization.

With a hundred billion dollars in the vein of valuation ideas, it recently announced the launch of a company review system. Simply put, it is to recreate a "public review" in the job recruitment market. But the ideal is like this, but the reality is different. In response to this move, Internet analyst Yu Bin pointed out that the pulse seems to have not yet found its own positioning and commercialization path, so it has repeatedly changed course after several tosses.

What was the pulse that was once rejected by the big factory, thinking?

Caused a lot of "trouble" to the big factory

At Pulse, it's not hard to master the traffic password.

A post, just need to hang a big factory tag, plus some conflicting elements, can become a popular post. Then it will be screenshotted, disseminated for secondary dissemination, spread to more platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, and eventually spread in the circle of employees in large factories.

Casually flipping through a few such posts, such as dismissal, layoffs, anger and other words, can touch the nerves of many people and attract hundreds of users to comment and follow the post. Some of the followers will hang the identity tags of Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, iQiyi and other big manufacturers, but more are using flower names. People hide behind screens, thinking that the internet can really protect privacy.

The one that contributes the most active users to Pulse is the "Professional Speech" area, which was once known for its anonymity. Here are full of stories of big factories: the most common is to ask about the salary level after taking an offer, as well as to complain about the strangeness of leaders and colleagues, and sometimes share some blind date experiences that have nothing to do with the workplace. Everyone came here under the shell of professional identity, each with a purpose.

A piece of information spreads very quickly, sometimes in hours, or even tens of minutes, to the head of crisis public relations of the company in question. The power of these posts is so great that just a string of characters written by the whistleblower on the keyboard of the mobile phone can make the listed companies with trillions of market capitalization fall down to the scale of hundreds of billions.

Chen Boming, an employee of the big factory, suffered greatly. Because of a post about the violent dismissal of employees by the company he worked for, he immediately dropped the job at hand on a normal weekday afternoon and opened his pulse to confirm the source of the information. The post has already made the list of hot topics in the pulse, and his brain is immediately confused, followed by anger.

He called the post "grossly untrue", saying only how wronged the employee himself was, but not mentioning the employee's actual performance in the company.

Chen Boming felt that the situation was not good, and his first thought was to contact the staff of the pulse side and wanted to ask the other party to delete this "false news" immediately. The response was: "You can respond to the original post, but you can't delete the original post." After a minute of entanglement, Chen Boming still rejected this strategy. He feels that if you respond to the original post, it will increase the heat of the original post and further escalate the discussion of the event, which is actually a situation that the public relations of the big factories do not want to see.

Thinking about it, Chen Boming later concluded, "The pulse is to guide itself." ”

At nine o'clock that night, reports of the incident began to circulate one after another, and after 12 hours, the relevant terms had been hung on the Weibo hot search list, and the number of readers continued to rise. As for the source, it is undoubtedly a screenshot from the vein.

The incident whistleblower Xiao K later recalled to the "Finance and Economics" weekly that he chose to break the news in the pulse because he had often seen the unfair information in the workplace on the pulse before, and his own things had long been spoken out by colleagues on the pulse. He did not want to "make a big deal out" of this matter, to some extent, it is precisely because he is afraid of the expansion of things that he chose a more concentrated pulse of the Internet peers, rather than platforms such as Weibo and Douyin. Little K, who has been mixed with pulses for many years, naturally believes that pulses are suitable for "workplace rights protection".

In that post, Xiao K chose the nickname of a martial arts character, with a bit of jianghu atmosphere and a little bit of bad meaning. But unexpectedly, his post has been commented by thousands of users, and he was pushed onto the pulse heat list, "At that time, I was very excited and felt hopeful, but at the same time I was worried, afraid of being eaten by public opinion." ”

Crisis PR pays attention to prime time, but this kind of emergency has caught PR off guard. Sun Ling, another public relations official of a large factory, once saw the information of the company's layoffs on the pulse, but the transmission was very outrageous. She sent a series of retraction letters, lawyer letters, and clarification letters to the opposing staff, but did not receive a response. What made Sun Ling even more angry was that the documents they sent not only did not receive a reply, but also broke the news about the company's employees, but also were pushed to users by the pulse pop-up window.

Once the best time is missed, just a few words will ferment a huge power of public opinion. The news of the layoffs has spread to the end of the company's business customers, and customers have begun to demand refunds on a large scale. Sun Ling could only try to clarify the pulse first, but he could not send it out for a long time, "The company is almost yellow, and the clarification has not yet been issued." ”

Because of these circumstances, the pulse has become the "enemy" of the big factory.

Lin Fan, the founder of Pulse, graduated from Tsinghua University and is a disciple of Wang Xiaochuan, the founder of Sogou. In previous media interviews, Lin Fan bluntly said that Pulse may have received hundreds of CEO deletion requests. Sometimes even to the point of using the law, Tianyancha data show that the main company of the pulse " Beijing Taoyou Tianxia Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd." has a total of 182 judicial risks, of which 60 legal proceedings, including Baidu, Sina, Suning, Ele.me, Cheduoduo and other Internet manufacturers, most of them sue pulse on the grounds of reputation disputes and unfair competition, and most of them are mainly based on pulse losses.

What does Pulse make money on?

Pulse was born in the classical Internet period, and most of the companies born at the same time as it have become larger, and have made breakthroughs in user scale and revenue level. However, the pulse has always been tepid, and a prominent manifestation is that it has not yet been listed.

In the eyes of some, The business model of Pulse "also looks very screwed up". A big factory person who has repeatedly contacted the pulse party said that the pulse toB (referring to the company) is not good service, and the toC (refers to the user) is also not good service, "it is a small company."

In 2013, when Pulse was founded, it was the LinkedIn who was 10 years older than it. LinkedIn's monetization model mainly relies on advertising and recruitment, officially entered China in 2014, and launched the workplace social product "Red Rabbit" to benchmark the pulse, but after 5 years, it was disobedient. In December 2021, LinkedIn also turned off its social function and officially withdrew from the Chinese market.

Before the pulse, there are also a number of domestic workplace social platforms such as Renhe Network, Youshi.com, Tianji, Ruolin, and Dajie, which ended in disgrace without exception. In 2014, the mobile Internet world set off a social heat wave, and dozens of anonymous social apps such as Wumi, Hehe, Crow, and Toast were launched, but because of the increasingly mixed content and the commercialization problem that is difficult to monetize, most of them have disappeared.

After the opponent withdrew, in 2018, the pulse of user accumulation in the early stage began to start the recruitment business and began to charge the enterprise side. According to informed sources, at present, among the three major revenue sources of pulse advertising, employer brand services and recruitment services, the recruitment business accounts for the largest proportion and the fastest growth. The habits of large factories that like frequent job hopping have allowed almost all well-known factories to settle in the pulse recruitment.

Based on the different workplace environments at home and abroad, Pulse has begun to take a very different path from LinkedIn. A senior headhunter told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that LinkedIn communicated in the form of emails, most of which were global elite talents such as returnees, white-collar workers, VCs (venture capital), and some foreign professional managers, who also actively shaped their professional images on the LinkedIn in order to jump ship to the next job; and the pulse was relatively "sinking", "More are some mid-range talents, and mainly concentrated in the Internet industry, sales industry." ”

Paid memberships are also a source of income. An HR who worked at ByteDance said that his time using Pulse accounted for 30% of his usual work, in order to facilitate the viewing of candidates, he had to spend 68 yuan every month to buy Pulse members, "Members are too expensive, but if you don't buy it, you can't see a lot of things."

In 2020, we have long discovered the pulse of workplace social in China, and shifted from "social" to "community" at the strategic level. In short, no longer try to make users add friends to each other, but produce more content, let more users participate in communication, and make itself a reservoir of traffic, just like Douban and Zhihu.

One of the strategies of transformation, the user ID of the Pulse Job Talk Area has changed from the "flower name" mode of multiple people using one person to the "unique nickname" of one person corresponding to one person, which pulse officials said was "encouraging users to speak more responsibly". Previously, in 2018, Pulse was required to rectify because of the "anonymous" posting function. Some insiders have pointed out that relying on anonymity to bring about the pulse of user growth, after this rectification, there will inevitably be a decrease in attractiveness, and the user's desire to post may also be reduced.

A user in the "industry circle" of the pulse has been ranked in the top three, said that because the pulse began to focus on the construction of the content community, he has changed from quietly brushing posts to operating personal IP with his heart, "speaking with a nickname, no matter how many likes and comments are attracted, others do not know that it is you, real-name posting can attract more people and make yourself ranked at the top of the career list."

People are clustered in groups, and pulse has also launched "circle of colleagues" and "circle of industry" according to different companies and industries. On February 22, Caijing Tianxia Weekly saw that in the "circle of colleagues" company heat list, Baidu's current popularity is the highest, with 160,000 visits, followed by Ant Group, Kuaishou and Tencent, all of which also have more than 100,000 visits. Communication electronics, entertainment media, automobiles, construction and other "industry circles", the number of members shows that it has exceeded 1 million people.

For the domestic workplace, which promotes more circle culture, the content community does seem to be more attractive than socializing, but the contradiction between To B and To C has also surfaced.

An employee who had jumped from Weibo to Pulse to do content operations told Caijing Tianxia Weekly that at first, in order to push more hot topics, Pulse often artificially created some controversial topics, "The traffic is not so large at all, and can only make up some stories for others to watch." ”

Jiang Yao, a large factory employee who brushes the pulse for two hours a day, summed up his observations for more than 40 days: Do you know what posts are most likely to be hot, half of them are similar to "96 years, deposit 1 million, now want to jump ship", "just change jobs, salary double", "fresh graduates, total package 50w, consider whether to jump ship", etc., "become very much like the Little Red Book, relying on things that are not very real to stimulate the desire of others to watch." ”

An employee who works at Didi even came up with a formula for the proportion of pulse content: "65% anxiety + 25% sense of separation between traditional ideas and modern cities + 10% misogyny." ”

Some ordinary users' trust in pulse began to waver. In early 2021, after the sudden death of Pinduoduo employees fermented from the pulse, an employee who had exposed his colleagues in the pulse was rumored to have been fired. Suddenly, users who had posted by their nicknames were upset, worried that Pulse had sold their information to the company. In this regard, the official pulse said, "Do not provide any third party with the user information of the posting area in any form." ”

Sun Ling, a public relations official of the big factory, found that in the "circle of colleagues", the posters default to people from the same company, so they are more "free to speak", and they exchange some information that is strictly forbidden to be transmitted, and even randomly take screenshots and transmit them to the outside. Here, there are professionally certified employees, including those who have not updated their profiles. Sun Ling said that if you want to kick the departing employees out of the "circle of colleagues", you need to find a pulse to cooperate again.

Another person from the big factory was also indignant about this, "People have already left, still bear the identity of employees, and some are still speaking casually there, reading internal news in the circle of colleagues." ”

Now, more and more companies have registered enterprise numbers on the pulse, officially responded to external doubts with official identities, broken false rumors, and launched employer brand building, "but while scolding and building, let HR do what? The above-mentioned big factory person said.

Review mode is nothing new

In 2022, Pulse's new move on the review model is essentially to the recruitment end.

"Consumer reviews will make bad reviews disappear; pulse company reviews will make bad reviews disappear." Pulse Company reviews a small step, a big step in the recruitment industry. Lin Fan said in an interview with the media.

But the road is one foot high, and the public reviews have been active for so long, and consumers have not been able to order takeaways with confidence. What's more, for recruitment, everyone looking for a job has more personal needs, not just looking at "salty, sweet, bitter and spicy" like eating. "Finance and Economics" weekly saw that in the newly launched review function of Pulse, there will be a review process after the review information is completed, but the person who sent the review does not have to go through professional certification to review.

In fact, corporate reviews are nothing new. Glassdoor from California, USA, has been doing workplace review services since 2008, where internal employees will conduct an anonymous evaluation of their company once a year, share salary information, evaluate the office environment, and review these evaluations is also a big challenge.

The comment mechanism that originally enhanced the voice of employees is also likely to be reduced to disguised publicity, which makes the official "brush praise". In 2019, Glassdoor was exposed for acquiescing in the manipulation behind employers. Some media analysis of millions of anonymous comments on Glassdoor found that the comments of more than 400 companies have an abnormal monthly increase, and the growth rate of praise is obviously out of touch with reality, among which Musk's Space X and software giant SAP have seen multiple peaks.

How to balance the B-side and the C-side, how to balance the independence of anonymous reviews, Glassdoor has not yet given a better answer. The reality is that Glassdoor, who originally wanted to use the Internet to break the "information asymmetry" of recruitment, failed to hit the listing in 2018 and was acquired by the Japanese recruitment company Retract.

Of course, Glassdoor's Chinese apprentices have long been there.

In May 2014, Kanzhun.com was born, which evolved from the corporate review website "Fenzhi Network", and its main business is to allow employers to anonymously share the company's basic information, salary information, interview experience, recruitment positions and other information. This attracted the attention of people in the TMT field at that time, and looked at the network to catch a small fire, but because of the lack of the necessary review mechanism, it also caused a lot of lawsuits, and gave a position that was highly similar to the pulse - I only provided the platform, but I was not responsible for the authenticity.

Soon after, The quasi-network differentiated an app specifically used to expose the salary, but there was no improvement. Later, it differentiated its recruitment business into an independent recruitment software - "Boss Direct Recruitment", intending to subvert the traditional written interview recruitment model, replace the traditional talent market recruitment channels, and shouted out the magic advertisement in the subway and elevator: Looking for a job, I want to talk to the boss.

Just when "direct recruitment" quickly became popular, many candidates found that most of the people who communicated with themselves across the screen were STILL HR, which made the so-called direct recruitment model a slogan, and platforms such as Liepin, Zhilian Recruitment, and 58.com became indistinguishable. As for the kanju network used to comment on employers, it has not aggregated more traffic after many splits, and it has also been forgotten by history.

Glassdoor is trapped in content management, the direct employment model is trapped in the dilemma of "real BOSS fake boss", and it wants to use the review mode to create the pulse of the workplace community recruitment model, and there may be a long way to explore in the future.

Now, for the big factory people who pretend to be calm in the heat of the water, the pulse seems to play more of the role of the "pantry", so that they can write one emotional post after another during the paid squatting time, in the boring time of the subway, to see which business lines of the company are laying off employees, and how much the performance of other employees has been taken.

At 11:30 p.m., Su Jing, who was still in a meeting, brushed a post complaining about the company's professional words in the pulse, lamenting that their company's projects were rotten, the atmosphere was poor, and there were many leadership matters. A few days ago, she also answered a headhunting call in the bathroom, at this time looked up at the PPT in front of her that did not know when it was finished, and then looked down at the mobile phone that was about to run out of power, and the anxiety of leaving was even heavier.

(In the text, Su Jing, Chen Boming, Sun Ling, Xiao K, and Jiang Yao are pseudonyms)

This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.