Hiring workers is growing in price – Newspaper Kommersant No. 195 (7396) of 10/20/2022

The increase in tariffs for posting vacancies at the largest recruiting service HeadHunter outraged participants in the online trading market. They are asking the anti-monopoly service to check the site for abuse of their position and warn that rising staffing costs threaten to increase the prices of goods. Lawyers note that the very fact of price growth will not be enough to recognize HeadHunter as a violator, it will have to prove its redundancy.

“Kommersant” got acquainted with the complaint of the Association of Internet Trade Companies (AKIT; includes Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex.Market, etc.) dated October 19 to the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) on HeadHunter’s pricing policy. As stated in the appeal, customers of the service have recently noted “an unreasonable increase in prices for services.” According to AKIT, since March 2020, HeadHunter has increased the cost of posting a vacancy at the standard rate in a package for 1,000 ads from 85 rubles to 340 rubles. for a unit. Several other services have also risen in price significantly, the complaint says.

As explained in ACIT, HeadHunter is the largest recruiting service in the Russian Federation and one of the three world leaders. More than 350 thousand companies act as clients of the portal, and the database contains over 50 million resumes. Thus, HeadHunter can influence pricing in its market, AKIT notes. The association asks the FAS to recognize the actions of HeadHunter as abuse of dominance and issue an order to eliminate violations. The FAS clarified to Kommersant that the complaint is still being considered. HeadHunter reported that they did not receive notifications from the FAS about the receipt of the ACIT appeal.

HeadHunter CEO Mikhail Zhukov, in a letter to Svyaznoy’s HR Vice President Kirill Popov (Kommersant also has a copy), AKIT’s calculations denied. According to him, the publication of a vacancy at a standard rate in a package of 1,000 ads has risen in price by only 10% since March 2020, and customers with such a need can qualify for discounts. At the same time, according to the reports of HeadHunter Group PLC, in 2021 the company’s revenue grew by 92.8%, to 15.96 billion rubles, net profit – by 191.3%, to 5.49 billion rubles.

According to Kommersant’s interlocutor in online trading, HeadHunter proposed to resolve the issue without the intervention of the regulator, but meetings with companies did not bring results. An interlocutor of Kommersant in a large retail chain clarifies that trade enterprises require a large staff of linear personnel, which requires mass placement of vacancies, so this industry “strongly feels the effect of price increases.” Only online retailers place tens of thousands of vacancies annually, and the growth of tariffs for finding employees creates an additional burden on retail prices, another Kommersant source says.

Mikhail Burmistrov, General Director of Infoline-Analytics, notes that any large Internet company today needs to constantly expand its staff for smooth operation and development. Highly qualified specialists are reluctant to change jobs, and employers have to invest more effort and money in finding employees, adds Alexei Zakharov, president of SuperJob. But, he emphasizes, the rates of Russian online recruiting services lag far behind those in the US and Europe.

The commercial director of Rabota.ru Vladimir Koritsky says that over the past two years, the cost of the service’s tariffs has grown by about 40% due to an increase in resources for the development and development of the portal. According to Mr. Zakharov, SuperJob changed its business model in July of this year: now employers pay the service not for posting vacancies, but for each application received.

Yaroslav Kulik, managing partner of the consulting company Kulik & Partners Law.Economics, warns that the fact of price growth alone will not be enough to establish a violation by HeadHunter. According to him, the service can still prove that the cost of services was not monopoly high and HeadHunter did not benefit from its market position. Anastasia Kayukova, senior antitrust and regulatory lawyer at Vegas Lex, adds that the FAS may need to analyze the market for online job search services.

Alina Savitskaya