Not long ago, Lin Fan, CEO of Pulse, targeted BOSS direct recruitment, saying that it did not solve the pain points of high-end talents, and Pulse's full-dimensional recruitment formed a dimensionality reduction blow to BOSS direct recruitment. The so-called full-dimensional recruitment is actually "social + community + intelligent algorithm".
This criticism is easily reminiscent of creating momentum for the high-end road of the vein.
Not long ago, Pulse established "Pulse High Recruitment", focusing on the high-end talent market with an annual income of more than 300,000 yuan. Lin Fan took the direct chat model as a target, "The direct chat model is more suitable for standard jobs and positions such as accounting and designers, but it cannot solve the job search needs of high-end talents, so the pulse high recruitment came into being."
Internet recruitment is actually a heavy marketing industry, and it is not surprising that such a "spray" event is needed to attract the attention of users. However, the pulse has entered the high-end action, which has aroused the interest of many people in the industry.
As far as the entire Internet recruitment industry is concerned, after the decline in market growth, high-end has indeed become the direction for platforms to find increments, and there is still a lot of commercialization space to be tapped.
However, the opponent that Pulse really targets should be Liepin, not BOSS Zhipin. Because Liepin has been focusing on the mid-to-high-end talent market, BOSS direct recruitment is mainly blue-collar and junior white-collar.
More importantly, through Liepin, you can find that the high-end road that Pulse wants to enter is not so easy to take. In terms of market value and revenue, Liepin is not as good as the "low-dimensional" BOSS Zhipin. That is to say, at least in terms of capital markets and enterprise scale, it has not dealt a dimensionality reduction blow to the latter.
What problems does Liepin encounter in high-end? Can the vein, which is making the leap to the high-end, surpass Liepin and form a dimensionality reduction blow to BOSS Zhipin?
On the high-end mountain of Internet recruitment, there is a fog to be penetrated.
The "talent dividend" that rolls in
The market space for high-end talent recruitment is actually beaten out by the tide of the times.
After the 2008 global financial crisis, the cover of Time magazine in the United States chose three Chinese migrant workers. Americans on the other side of the ocean believe that the reason why China's economy has made great achievements is due to the demographic dividend created by the huge group of Chinese migrant workers.
It must be admitted that China's economic achievements over the past four decades have largely depended on the demographic dividend. However, now that China has entered the ranks of middle-income countries, labor costs are also rising, and it is difficult to achieve sustainability by relying on the demographic dividend, and the "talent dividend" of high-quality development is imperative.
With the popularization of higher education in recent years, the number of people with college and above has gradually increased, and social development has shifted from the demographic dividend period to the talent dividend period. Coupled with the gradual transformation and upgrading of the traditional manufacturing industry in China, the rise of high-end industries such as AI, chips, and robots, and the acceleration of the digital transformation of enterprises due to the epidemic, the market has put forward greater demand for high-end talents.
However, there is still a huge gap between talent supply and demand. According to the "Manufacturing Talent Development Planning Guide" issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the talent gap in China's ten key areas of manufacturing industry exceeded 19 million in 2020 and will approach 30 million by 2025, with a gap rate of 48%.
Under the short supply, the shortage of talents is directly reflected in the high-end recruitment market. According to iResearch's report, the size of China's recruitment market in 2021 reached 148.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 23%. Among them, the size of the high-end recruitment market accounted for 86.5%, reaching 128.8 billion yuan.
Behind the huge market size, more companies have more demand for high-end talents, and are also willing to pay more for recruiting high-end talents. This will provide a broad nugget space for many recruitment platforms, and it is also the main driving force to attract platforms such as Pulse to enter the game.
The top three online recruitment platforms in China are three major players, namely Worry-free Future, BOSS Direct Recruitment and Liepin, accounting for nearly 70% of the market share. Relatively speaking, the two rising stars of BOSS Direct Recruitment and Liepin are more typical and growing.
In terms of market positioning, BOSS Direct Recruitment is mainly blue-collar and junior white-collar workers, with a total of 113.2 million certified job seekers. Among the certified enterprises, the proportion of small and medium-sized enterprises with less than 100 employees reached 84.6%, and the profit model was mainly to provide online recruitment services for these enterprises and then charge fees.
Liepin has been focusing on the segment of high-end talent recruitment, and its profit model is also mainly to collect recruitment service fees from business owners.
At present, the market value of BOSS Zhipin has reached HK$80.2 billion, much higher than the HK$6.4 billion of Liepin. In the first three quarters of last year, BOSS Zhipin's revenue was 3.42 billion yuan, higher than Liepin's 2.01 billion yuan"1".
According to common sense, the demand in the field of high-end recruitment is large, the nugget space is broad, the gap between the market value and revenue of Liepin and BOSS direct recruitment should not be so large, why do they occupy the upper hand?
Solving this puzzle will have valuable enlightenment for Pulse to enter the road of high-end recruitment.
And the answer lies in the essence of Internet recruitment.
Perspective on the "high-end puzzle"
Internet recruitment platforms often wrap themselves in various marketing strategies, but in essence it is still a very traditional business.
The ultimate goal is to complete the matching between job seekers and recruiters.
This kind of matching may seem simple, but it is actually very complicated. Because unlike "people looking for goods" or "goods finding people" in e-commerce, recruitment matches the process of "people finding people", and "people" is often the most uncertain factor, so there are often "structural mismatch" problems in the market.
Since the beginning of the year, many manufacturing enterprises and foreign trade enterprises in coastal Guangdong and other places are expanding the scale of recruitment, and some enterprises have even hired more than a dozen recruitment companies to help recruit people. However, the opposite of this boom is that many young people on the mainland cannot find suitable jobs. Statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security show that in recent years, the job search ratio (number of people in demand / number of job seekers) in the domestic labor market has remained above 1.0 for a long time, which means that demand is greater than supply.
This "structural mismatch", on the one hand, lies in the fact that many young people now prefer to deliver takeaway and run Didi rather than go to factories, and on the other hand, it also stems from the imbalance between supply and demand caused by poor information.
In the field of high-end talent recruitment, this "mismatch" is more obvious. Because in this field, matching is more complex and there are more implicit needs.
Relatively speaking, high-end talents are more "tsundere" in job hunting or job hopping. Just like Liu Beisan Gu Maolu invited Zhuge Liang, high-end talents are more willing to be actively discovered and contacted.
According to data from the Pulse Talent Think Tank, mid-to-high-end talents with an annual salary of more than 300,000 are more likely to be discovered. As their income increases, their willingness to actively seek employment decreases. Among the workers with an annual salary of more than 1 million, more than half are passively looking for jobs. In the blue-collar or junior white-collar job market, the opposite is true, with job seekers being more active.
It is this "tsundere" that makes the application decision-making cycle of high-end talents longer and more demanding. The data shows that among the workers with an annual salary of 500,000~1 million, more than 1/4 of the job search decision-making period exceeds 2 months, and among the workers with an annual salary of more than 1 million, this proportion has increased to 40%.
More passive job search and longer decision-making periods actually make the matching between recruiters and applicants more complicated, and there are more non-standard and implicit conditions. Therefore, high-end recruitment usually requires headhunters to carry out manual matching, and algorithms that do not understand human nature often fail.
Under this situation, Liepin has created a B (enterprise)-H (headhunting)-C (job seeker) model, using a large number of headhunters to contact high-end talents, which can relatively improve the matching efficiency in the high-end recruitment market, and is a high-quality "matchmaker".
However, it is not a good moneymaker. Players who occupy high-end segments in various industries often have high net profit margins, which is the ability to make money. For example, Moutai's net profit margin exceeds 50%, Apple's net profit margin exceeds 20%, but Liepin's net profit margin is only single digits, even lower than BOSS Direct and Worry-Free Future.
Behind the lower net profit margin, on the one hand, because the long decision-making cycle of high-end talents increases the matching and communication costs of headhunting, which in turn reduces the overall net profit margin of Liepin, on the other hand, because Liepin's profit model is too single, mainly relying on B-end enterprises to pay, while relying on job posting, resume downloading, package sales and other ways to make money, these ways have little profit space, and there is not much difference from the money-making methods of the older generation of recruitment platforms such as Zhaopin recruitment and worry-free future.
The track is promising, but the earning power is insufficient and the story is not novel enough, which is also an important reason why the valuation of Liepin is much lower than that of BOSS Zhipin.
So, can the newly added pulse of the track rely on the model of "social + community + intelligent algorithm" to tell a new good story?
Can Houlang tell a new story?
Internet recruitment is a two-sided market, connecting B-end enterprises on one end and C-end users on the other.
To break the profitability ceiling, the key is to achieve "network effects" in two-sided markets. That is, to increase the number of B-end enterprises or C-end users as much as possible, reduce operating costs through scale effects, and then tap more profit points.
At this time, "currying" over the B side or the C side becomes a key choice.
The older generation of recruitment platforms such as Zhaopin Recruitment and Worry-Free Future are more inclined to B-end enterprises and are not excellent in user experience. As the boss of the back wave, it pays more attention to the user experience of the C-end. On the one hand, it attracts C-end users through a large number of marketing activities, and on the other hand, it improves user stickiness through the "mobile + direct chat" model.
When BOSS Direct Recruitment gained high user activity, it attracted many B-end enterprises to settle in. The "intelligent matching" of the platform reduces the "mismatch" in the entire recruitment process, further attracts more enterprises, and allows BOSS Direct Recruitment to tap more profit space. This model tells a new story to capital, so the market value of BOSS Zhipin is far ahead of its peers.
Pulse has entered the high-end "social + community + intelligent algorithm" model, and the "mobile + direct chat + intelligent matching" model of BOSS direct employment is actually biased towards users. Of course, the biggest difference is "community" and "direct chat".
As a backwave in the high-end recruitment field, can Pulse attract more C-end users and B-end enterprises by relying on "community"?
Not necessarily.
Previously, Pulse attracted a large number of C-end users through its unique "anonymous workplace socialization". It was also once known as the "workplace pantry" by breaking out many large factories one after another. Some users who have no intention of applying for a job will also visit the community psychologically in gossip. This strong social and community attribute strengthens the user stickiness of the pulse.
However, in terms of the scale of C-end users, Pulse is still weaker than other recruitment platforms. According to QuestMobile data, Pulse MAU was around 3.8 million in December 2021, with BOSS directly hiring MAU exceeding 10 million and Liepin MAU exceeding 6 million in the same period.
More importantly, high-end talents are not interested in social or anonymous evaluation in the process of job search. A middle manager of a company told "Little Finance" that high-end talents usually have a circle, whether they are job hunting or job-hopping, they generally give priority to introducing them through acquaintances or contacting headhunters, and rarely understand the company through social platforms.
For B-end enterprises, the so-called "paying gold owners", the social model of Pulse is still not dominant. Because of the exposure of black materials, some companies avoid Pulse, and the profit growth of Pulse is also slow, according to the survey of the Stinging Research Institute, the current revenue of Pulse is mainly paid membership and selling courses.
In this way, entering the high-end recruitment market with social networking is more like a less feasible business plan, which needs to be tested in practice.
Of course, the Internet high-end recruitment market is still promising. iMedia consulting report shows that China's online recruitment market is gradually growing, reaching 20.2 billion yuan in 2022 and is expected to reach 28.9 billion yuan by 2024.
In the movie "No Thief in the World", Uncle Ge left a classic line: What is the most expensive in the 21st century? Talent! Although Uncle Ge did not study business management, it coincided with the management master Drucker's view: enterprises have only one real resource: people.
With the upgrading of the industry, the demand for high-end talents will become more and more vigorous, and the space for high-end Internet recruitment will continue to increase, and entrants including Liepin and Pulse need to find a balance between matching efficiency and commercialization in order to continue to grow themselves.
On this long track, the one who laughs last is the king.
Exegesis:
"1" BOSS direct employment and Liepin market value statistics as of February 24