There are five ways to fund a company like this one. We closed four of them. Members fund most of what is left, and every other source of money we take is listed on this page. Below is what each of the four would have cost you, and where every membership dollar actually goes.
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None of these are hypothetical. Each is the standard model for a company shaped like ours, and each one has an obvious buyer waiting.
A venture fund returns its entire portfolio from a handful of positions, so every company it backs is asked to behave like the one that might. For a career platform that pressure lands in exactly one place: charge the employers, because employers hold budgets and candidates do not. The product bends toward whoever is easiest to bill.
Ad-funded means attention is the thing being sold, and every design decision quietly starts optimising for time on page rather than time to a job. The best outcome for you — finding a role on your first visit and never needing us again — becomes the worst outcome for the business. We would notice that conflict once, and then stop noticing it.
Paid placement is the default model for job boards, and it is why the top of most of them is not the best role but the best-funded recruiter. On our board an employer can pay a flat fee to list a role for a set time, but never to move it up. Position is earned — by publishing a salary band, naming honest hiring locations and replying to applicants. Ranking has never been for sale, and that difference is the entire product.
We hold search history, salary expectations, applications and rejections. That data has a live market — recruiters, brokers, model trainers — and it is the single easiest revenue line available to us. It is also the one that would make every other promise on this site worth nothing, including the nine above it on the charter.
People take the whole first line — they cost more than everything else combined, which is the shape of any company that is mostly people. The other seven are drawn to scale against each other across the two lines beneath.
Indicative figures for planning, expressed as a share of total membership revenue. Not yet audited.
These are not omissions. They are the four largest revenue opportunities available to a company like ours, drawn at the width they occupy.
Some companies publish every salary and every line of spend. We admire it but have a slightly different take. Here is the version we hold ourselves to without quietly abandoning it several years down the line.
Sixty-two cents of your dollar pays people to build the thing you are using. There is no investor at the end of it, and no advertiser sitting between you and a job.
30,000 members across 180+ countries. Members fund most of it. Nobody funds our ranking.
