HeadHunter has acquired a 25% stake as a result of a capital injection into Skillaz, a developer of advanced recruitment solutions.
The news was reported earlier this week by business daily Vedomosti, which cited exchanges with an official company HeadHunter representative. The funding will be used for recruitment and company development purposes.
Neither the amount nor other details of the transaction were disclosed, but an “unnamed source close to the deal” told Vedomosti that Skillaz was valued at 1 billion rubles in total ($15 million at the current exchange rate). HeadHunter has received an option to complete the acquisition in the future, according to this source.
Founded in 2015, Skillaz has developed tools to help companies automate personnel selection. These tools include robotic processing of job boards, social networks, and evaluation of candidates using AI.
Skillaz’s solutions are used by such companies as Gazprom Neft, KPMG, MegaFon, Sberbank, Uber and others. In 2017, the startup was distinguished as “one of Russia’s 12 best startups” at an international event.
Among the company’s shareholders are top managers from MegaFon, notes Vedomosti.
HeadHunter is the leader in the online recruitment segment in Russia as well as in several neighboring Russian-speaking countries. It was founded in 2000 under the name ‘National Job Club’. Starting from 2007, Yuri Milner’s Digital Sky Technologies (which later became Mail.Ru Group) bought stakes in HeadHunter, but Mail.Ru Group sold the company in 2016.
HeadHunter’s new owners are “investors close to Alisher Usmanov,” a key shareholder of Digital Sky Technologies and Mail.Ru Group, notes industry observer Yury Amnosov.
