During the graduation season, BOSS Zhipin made 1.1 billion yuan without any effort.

This article tells that the employment situation in 2024 is very severe and recruitment is difficult. Under such circumstances, BOSS has become the winner. Through the analysis and comparison of data over the years, it fully and accurately explains why BOSS has become the final winner. These data also give some tips to graduates and job seekers, so that they can use BOSS to find jobs in the future.

Online ride-hailing vehicles are fully booked, food delivery drivers are saturated, and 11.79 million fresh graduates are ready to go. The employment situation in 2024 may really be the "toughest employment season in history."

According to data released by the Ministry of Education, the number of graduates from regular colleges and universities nationwide is expected to reach 11.79 million in 2024, an increase of 210,000 year-on-year.

The 2025 autumn recruitment is coming soon, but many graduates from the previous year may not have found a job yet.

"The graduates of the class of 2024 can't find jobs. They spend most of the night and morning browsing BOSS Direct Hire, saying hello, submitting resumes, and scheduling interviews..." A recent graduate with a business English major in Jiangxi told Xin entropy that she submitted 55 resumes on BOSS Direct Hire, but in the end only had one interview and no offers.

A large number of job seekers have flooded recruitment websites such as BOSS Direct, but it is still difficult for companies to recruit suitable talents, while BOSS Direct has won without any effort.

According to BOSS Zhipin's financial report, in the first quarter of 2024, the company's adjusted net profit was 531 million yuan, up 117% year-on-year. The average monthly active users reached 46.6 million, up 17% year-on-year.

The more anxious companies and job seekers are, the more money Boss Direct will make.

1. “Boss rejects me directly”: It’s too difficult to find a job

Recently, netizens have jokingly called BOSS Direct Hire "BOSS Direct Rejection" because many recruiters "read but did not reply" to messages they sent to companies.

It is an indisputable fact that it is difficult for young people to find jobs. Many people even joked that "Boss is not hiring because Boss is also looking for a job."

A recent graduate from Shanghai told Xinentropy that he had experienced a fruitless autumn recruitment in September 2023, then a slightly fruitful spring recruitment in 2024, and finally joined the social recruitment. It was not until July, when he was about to graduate, that he received a relatively satisfactory offer. He found a job after a year, which was considered lucky because there were still a group of graduates who failed to find jobs.

In the "2024 Autumn Recruitment Unemployment Rate Survey" conducted by Niuke Community at the beginning of the year, a total of 2,623 people participated in the survey, of which 38.9% of them did not receive any offers. Among them, there are many 985 undergraduate and master's graduates who returned home disappointed in the autumn recruitment.

The 2024 "College Student Employment Survey Report" released by Zhaopin.com shows that the offer acquisition rate for undergraduate graduates from ordinary colleges and universities is 43.9%, while the offer acquisition rate for master's and doctoral graduates from ordinary undergraduate (non-double first-class) colleges and universities is 33.2%, a decrease of 17 percentage points from last year.

According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate in urban areas nationwide was 5% in April, the lowest level this year, which means that the domestic employment situation is generally stable. However, when broken down into specific age groups, the situation is still not optimistic. The unemployment rate of young workers aged 16 to 24 reached 14.7%, and the unemployment rate of workers aged 25 to 29 also reached 7.1%, both higher than the average unemployment rate.

In March this year, the retailer Pang Donglai released a recruitment demand, recruiting 209 people. All of them were under the age of 30, with a maximum annual salary of 150,000 yuan. In the end, it received more than 30,000 resumes, among which many applicants from 985 and 211 were rejected, equivalent to a recruitment ratio of 151:1.

In fact, as colleges and universities expand, the number of college graduates has been increasing in recent years, while the number of people recruited by companies has been decreasing.

According to Liepin's 2024Q2 Recruitment Survey Report, about 33.85% of companies will increase the number of talent recruitment, and about 24.14% of companies will reduce the number of recruitment. Compared with the survey results of the previous quarter, the proportion of companies that increased employee recruitment decreased, while the proportion of companies that reduced the number of recruitment increased.

Judging from the trend, in order to create more job opportunities, flexible employment has become another mainstream track.

As early as 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the National Development and Reform Commission and other eight departments issued a document stating that all new employment forms of workers will be included in the scope of basic public services for labor security. This includes positions such as food deliverymen, online car-hailing drivers, and truck drivers who rely on Internet platforms for employment.

It is no longer news that college students and middle-aged people deliver takeout or drive Didi. But as the "track is crowded", the so-called "new triathlon" is not easy to do.

Today, Meituan's food delivery stations are crowded with deliverymen. Meituan's food delivery data shows that in 2018, there were only 2.7 million Meituan delivery riders, and by 2023, the number of riders had increased to 7.45 million.

Online ride-hailing drivers are also facing a situation of "too many people and too little porridge". Data from the Ministry of Transport shows that as of December 2020, a total of 2.891 million online ride-hailing driver licenses have been issued in various places, and as of May 2024, a total of 7.033 million online ride-hailing driver licenses have been issued in various places.

Fierce job competition is also taking place in the field of flexible employment.

2. It’s difficult to do both, BOSS Zhipin “makes money without doing anything”

In recent years, due to the adjustment of economic development trends, layoffs in enterprises are common, and many re-employment groups have joined the originally huge job-seeking market for graduates. Job hunting has changed from a low-frequency behavior to a dynamic demand, or even a daily demand.

"After finally finding a job, I soon have a lot of troubles. Every day on the subway and before going to bed, I check BOSS Direct Hiring, not necessarily thinking that I can find a better opportunity, but to see how bad the jobs are in the market and remind myself to work hard." This is the voice of employees. With the renewal and iteration of the industry, many companies have fallen into a bottleneck period, internal business competition has become more intense, and it is difficult for employees to have a stable job status.

As you can imagine, under such circumstances, the number of active users of BOSS Zhipin has increased significantly. From 2019 to the first quarter of this year, the number of monthly active users of BOSS Zhipin has soared from 11.5 million to 46.6 million.

The surge in active users has also attracted more business owners to join and conduct online recruitment from a larger talent pool. In fact, more than 99% of BOSS Zhipin's revenue comes from the online recruitment business of corporate customers. In the first quarter of this year, the number of BOSS Zhipin's paying corporate customers increased to 5.7 million, compared with only 1.2 million in 2019.

In fact, BOSS Zhipin was losing money in 2021 and before. From 2019 to 2021, BOSS Zhipin's net profit attributable to the parent company was -502 million yuan, -942 million yuan, and -1.071 billion yuan, respectively, with a cumulative loss of 2.5 billion yuan.

But since 2022, BOSS Direct's revenue and profits have been rising.

According to financial report data, BOSS Direct achieved revenue of 5.952 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 31.9%; the annual net profit was 1.099 billion yuan, nearly 10 times the 107 million yuan in 2022.

In the first quarter of this year alone, revenue reached 1.704 billion yuan, up 33% year-on-year; net profit for three months was 531 million yuan, more than twice that of the same period last year.

Looking closely at the source of BOSS Zhipin's revenue, it is basically derived from the service fees paid by corporate customers. In the first quarter of this year, the company's online recruitment services for corporate customers achieved revenue of 1.684 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 33.6%, accounting for as high as 98.8%; other service revenue (mainly including value-added services provided to job seekers) was 19.7 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.6%. Last year, the online recruitment service revenue for corporate customers increased by 32% to 5.889 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 32%, accounting for 98.9%.

In other words, the vast number of business owners with online recruitment needs support BOSS Direct Hiring. This is also the reality.

Xiao Zhang, an HR from a small and medium-sized enterprise in Beijing, showed Xin entropy a billing slip from BOSS Direct Hire. In June, the company purchased a one-year service for four VVIP accounts (one account for each mobile phone number) at a unit price of 8,000 yuan, and also purchased 10 search and chat cards at a unit price of 328 yuan (295 yuan after discount), for a total payment of 34,950 yuan.

Xiao Zhang's company has fewer than 50 employees. He uses BOSS Direct Hire most of the time and occasionally uses Maimai, but has not purchased the latter's membership service.

It is conceivable that for larger companies with more recruitment needs, the service fee paid to BOSS Direct will reach hundreds of thousands of yuan a year.

In the past year, BOSS Direct was able to achieve substantial growth, largely due to its expansion of incremental space among blue-collar groups and lower-tier markets, which also includes the flexible employment track mentioned above.

According to the "2023 China Blue-collar Employment Research Report", among the 747 million employed population in my country, the blue-collar group has a size of 400 million, accounting for more than 53%, which is nearly twice the size of the white-collar population.

In the blue-collar market, the largest recruitment demand comes from the service industry. According to the data of the seventh national census, the employed population in my country is 656 million, of which 135 million are in agriculture, 128 million are in white-collar and gold-collar jobs, 169 million are in manufacturing, and 220 million are in urban services.

Offline small shops in cities, such as hotels, restaurants, and beauty salons, have this kind of irregular and long-term recruitment needs. These service industries are usually highly mobile. Such small businesses often recruit a small number of people each time, but the frequency of recruitment is extremely high.

Workers, customer service, confinement nannies, drivers, these blue-collar users have driven the growth of BOSS Direct Hire users. Financial report data shows that BOSS Direct Hire's blue-collar job guarantee service "Conch Optimization" covered more than 27 million job seekers in the first quarter.

However, due to the increase in small and medium-sized customers, the number of paying corporate users has increased significantly, but this has affected the company's average single corporate payment amount. By the end of 2023, BOSS Zhipin's small and medium-sized customers (corporate customers with annual payments of less than 50,000 yuan) contributed nearly 4.6 billion yuan in revenue, accounting for 78.6%. In the first quarter of 2024, the single corporate payment amount was 1,107.6 yuan, a slight increase of only 0.4% year-on-year.

It is worth mentioning that in February this year, BOSS Zhipin spent US$52.7 million (approximately RMB 383 million) to acquire approximately 77% of the shares of WD Technology Investment Group Limited, a company that mainly provides blue-collar recruitment services.

Whether white-collar or blue-collar, their strong demand for jobs has led to a surge in the number of active users of BOSS Direct; and a sufficiently active talent pool has attracted business owners who are willing to pay long-term, who hope to recruit the talents they need on this platform.

3. Who can help the job market?

BOSS Direct’s revenue and profits have surged, but job seekers and recruiters are still in a dilemma, with a continued imbalance between supply and demand in the job market.

Xiao Zhang mentioned that using BOSS Direct to search for job seekers has the problem of inaccurate matching. For example, when recruiting for a "short video copywriter" position, most of the recommended talents have no relevant experience and cannot be matched, so she needs to spend a lot of time to screen them on her own.

For VVIP accounts, there are 200 "active chat privileges" per day. One chat privilege is used to recommend job seekers, and 30 chat privileges are used to actively search for job seekers. In other words, if you need to actively search and discover job seekers, you can only chat with 6 job seekers out of 200 chat opportunities on the surface.

As for job seekers taking the initiative to "say hello", Xiao Zhang's feeling is that "it's not as exaggerated as people say on the Internet". Only about ten people say hello every day.

Not only do recruiters have a bad experience, job seekers feel it even more deeply.

"Looking for a job, I want to talk to the boss", this was the precise job search positioning that BOSS Zhipin once focused on. However, with the increase in small and medium-sized enterprises, former white-collar job seekers will find that the positions on this platform have become mixed, and it is difficult to find the boss they like. A job seeker told Xinentropy that compared to BOSS Zhipin, he prefers to use Liepin, which has fewer positions but seems a bit "high-end".

Of course, what makes job seekers sad on BOSS Direct is that there seem to be a lot of recruiting positions, but after private chatting, either it will show "delivered" but no one has read it, or it will show "read" but there is no reply.

BOSS Zhipin is a platform-based business. When the demand for both recruitment and job hunting is high, the platform will make more money. When the matching degree between the two parties is not accurate enough, it will encourage payment behavior and "pay gold" to improve the accuracy.

Of course, BOSS Zhipin benefits from the entire job market. At present, mid- to high-end companies generally reduce costs and increase efficiency, and reduce recruitment, while the employment demand for highly educated talents increases every year. They are unwilling to "work in factories", which leads to a serious imbalance between supply and demand in the job market.

Maimai Gaopin explained this phenomenon in its 2023 spring recruitment report: "From the demand side, the number of newly issued mid- to high-end positions has decreased as the overall number of newly issued positions has decreased. From the supply side, the supply of mid- to high-end talents has continued to increase. In the 2023 spring recruitment, the supply of mid- to high-end talents accounted for 68.61%. The mismatch between supply and demand is obvious, causing some mid- to high-end talents to have to downgrade their employment."

Job seekers can’t find jobs, and employers can’t recruit talent, so they have to rely on recruitment software. In a sense, BOSS Direct Hire has “lived a good life” because it has kept up with the changing times.

When the job market picks up, it may be difficult for BOSS Zhipin to continue to make big money. But in this situation, recruitment software should efficiently promote social employment and try its best to provide value to the job market, which is the responsibility of the platform.

(Xiao Zhang in the article is a pseudonym)

Author: Lin Xi

Source: WeChat public account "New Entropy"