BOSS Zhipin’s financial report for the first quarter of 2025 was strong, with revenue of 1.923 billion yuan and net profit of 512 million yuan. The article provides an in-depth analysis of its profit model, pointing out that the platform is more profitable when the job market is up, and 99% of its revenue comes from enterprises, and it is profitable to expand the incremental market by attracting blue-collar markets, low-tier cities, and small, medium and micro enterprises with strong recruitment demand.
On May 22, BOSS Zhipin released its financial report for the first quarter of 2025, and many data performed strongly.
According to the financial report, the company’s revenue in the first quarter was 1.923 billion yuan, up 12.9% year-on-year, slightly exceeding analysts’ expectations. net profit was 512 million yuan, up 111.9% year-on-year. Excluding other income such as wealth management, the company’s adjusted operating profit in the first quarter was 690 million yuan.
Someone asked: I think it’s hard to find a job, why is BOSS Zhipin still making money? Is it that the more difficult it is to find a job, the more profitable the recruitment platform is?
We dug into the financial reports of BOSS Zhipin in recent years and found that the real situation is the opposite: employment difficulties do not make BOSS Zhipin more profitable. On the contrary, only when the job market goes upwards is when BOSS Direct Recruitment is more profitable.
How does BOSS Zhipin make money?
Financial reports and annual reports show how a listed company makes money.
Through BOSS Zhipin’s 2024 annual report, we found that 99% of the company’s revenue comes from enterprises. This means that the income contribution of job seekers to BOSS Direct Recruitment is almost negligible.
So how does BOSS Direct Recruitment charge the recruitment side?
The simple understanding is that the recruiter has to pay the platform for certain positions, and also buys some recruitment props that accelerate and improve efficiency.
So we will have a question: I feel that the recruitment demand of enterprises is not strong now, why do we have to spend money to recruit?
In fact, not all companies are not recruiting, but like the weather, there are “temperature differences” in different areas.
Therefore, we can analyze the user composition of the platform and learn about the local differences in the job market.
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It’s easy to see that the hiring “climate” is relatively good in three typical areas.
The first is the blue-collar market, which has had low internet penetration over the past 20 years but has been recruiting. The second is low-tier cities, and to this day, many bosses will only post job postings on the doorstep instead of online. Once again, small, medium and micro enterprises, newly established new companies, have strong recruitment needs.
For example, bun shops and barbershops in third- and fourth-tier cities, as well as manufacturing factories in coastal cities, most of the previous recruitment methods were only three ways: offline recruitment, acquaintance recommendation, and intermediary introduction. In recent years, it has gradually become a recruiter on BOSS Direct Recruitment.
The reason why BOSS Direct Recruitment can make money is mainly to move the recruitment of these scenarios to the Internet – although the original recruiting companies are no longer recruiting, they can turn the companies that are still recruiting in the society into platform users.
This is the “incremental market” mentioned in BOSS Zhipin’s financial report.
On the conference call, management revealed that the company’s blue-collar revenue accounted for more than 39% in the first quarter; the revenue contribution of third-tier cities and below increased by 3 percentage points year-on-year to more than 23%; The proportion of revenue of small and micro enterprises, that is, enterprises with less than 100 employees, reached a record high in the same period.
The next question is why BOSS Zhipin should be paid.
A typical question is: the demand of job seekers is greater than the recruitment demand of enterprises, why do companies have to pay BOSS direct recruitment when they are in an advantageous position in the job market?
It is not difficult to understand this issue. Indeed, if it is a very tight position, such as an administrative position with double salary at the end of the day from 9 to 5 on weekends, BOSS Direct Recruitment is eager to let companies post it for free in order to attract more job seekers to the platform to find jobs.
This is true in theory, and so is practice.
BOSS Direct Recruitment has released a data in mid-2024 that 3.5 million companies pay the company (not the same caliber as the financial report announcement). According to the annual report, there will be a total of 16.6 million companies directly hired by BOSS in 2024, which is roughly calculated, which is equivalent to the platform “generating electricity with love” for nearly 80% of enterprises.
There is also a situation where although there are many job seekers looking for jobs on the market, everyone is unwilling to go, that is, there are few job seekers and many recruiters for the position, and the recruitment competition is fierce. Then this type of position needs to be paid to publish. For example, sales, anchor, general worker, telemarketing, food delivery person and other positions.
This fee system also benefits job seekers – filtering out recruiters who are not good enough. In addition, because it is difficult for recruiters for such positions to recruit, they often send a large number of messages to job seekers, resulting in harassment. Therefore, BOSS Direct Recruitment will also limit the number of times it communicates to improve the user experience of job seekers.
To this end, some netizens summed up, “If an HR says that he wants money in the boss, I advise you not to go.”
The summary is that positions with more job seekers and fewer recruiters are free, and positions with fewer job seekers and more recruits are charged.
Understanding this, you can understand why BOSS Direct Recruitment and recruitment platforms wish for more positions and more. Because the easier it is for job seekers to find a job, the more profitable the recruitment platform is.
In addition, in the actual recruitment work, enterprises also have a lot of needs to improve efficiency.
HR and bosses of some companies often receive a lot of resumes, but in the current situation of very strong demand for job search, it is difficult to have enough time and energy to screen in the face of the gushing of job search information, so you will need to buy some tens to hundreds of yuan from BOSS Zhipin – after all, it is easier and cheaper than hiring an HR or intern.
If HR and the boss want to recruit a senior talent, they may also buy an equity and let the BOSS directly recruit to greet the job seeker who meets the portrait and see the other party’s intentions. The services provided by BOSS Zhipin here are equivalent to headhunting services.
In addition, there are people who are anxious to recruit many people at the same time and want a large number of job seekers to see their positions in a short period of time…… In short, for the main needs of enterprise recruitment, BOSS Direct Recruitment has corresponding products.
Now there is a voice on the market, one is that the price increase of BOSS Zhipin is very powerful. We pulled the platform’s financial report data from 2021 to the present, and unexpectedly found that in the past few years, the platform customer unit price (that is, the average revenue per paying user) has not fluctuated much every quarter.
According to public information, the price of BOSS direct recruitment is priced according to supply and demand. It is reasonable to speculate that some highly competitive positions such as sales, customer service, anchors, etc. will increase in price during the peak recruitment season, but on the whole, the platform has not increased prices.
In fact, BOSS Direct Recruitment makes money mainly by attracting HR and bosses who are still recruiting on the market to the platform, and then providing corresponding products. If there are more HR and bosses attracted, even if the unit price of customers does not rise, the platform’s revenue will continue to grow.
Therefore, if the recruitment market improves, then it is actually good for the performance of BOSS Direct Recruitment.
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The situation is getting better
Of course, what people are most concerned about is not BOSS direct recruitment, in fact, the core reason for paying attention to BOSS direct recruitment is to observe the warmth and coldness of the job market through the data of the recruitment platform.
According to Datayes data, from October to December 2024, the number of new recruitment posts on online recruitment platforms will be 17%, 21% and 14% respectively, and the number of new recruitment posts from January to April 2025 will increase by 24.1% year-on-year.
According to the official data released by the BOSS direct recruitment platform, since the Spring Festival, the recruitment demand on the enterprise side has maintained a recovery trend, and the average number of new positions posted from January to April increased by 17% year-on-year. Among them, the demand for blue-collar recruitment in the service industry, represented by catering and retail, has continued to pick up month-on-month since April, and the number of online positions in manufacturing recruitment in April has continued to increase year-on-year.
Not only the blue-collar market, but also the recruitment demand in the white-collar market has also shown a trend of stabilization and recovery, with advertising, professional services, Internet, finance, automobile and other industries leading the year-on-year growth rate.
Of course, these are all macro descriptions, and there will still be uneven hot and cold for everyone looking for a job.
A few days ago, a college student was hung up six times for an internship post in Tencent, and he was so angry that he posted a small red book. Some netizens commented that now companies are waiting for two kinds of people: the distressed phoenix and the chosen cattle and horses.
In the long run, this will gradually improve over time. Enterprises are waiting and seeing, and after business demand comes up, there is bound to be new recruitment needs. In addition, in recent years, more and more job seekers have become rational, and job seekers who can accept unreasonable demands from enterprises have been almost robbed by other companies.
In addition, it takes time for recruiters to reverse their perceptions. It is not too much to ask for a job with a weekend + reasonable salary, and the recruiter takes advantage of the bad environment to frantically press the salary. It is not too much to ask for a timely reply + paid trial, and it is too much for HR to read back and unpaid trial.
Of course, I also understand that small and medium-sized enterprises have been living a difficult life in the past two years, and the resources that can be allocated are very limited, but at this time, isn’t crazy squeezing a kind of exhaustion? It is better to take a long-term view, buy high-quality talents at a reasonable price, and patiently cultivate them.
After all, job seekers are not consumables, and recruitment costs are not costs, but an investment in the future.
