Glints Future Plan in Indonesia after Series C Funding

After securing $22.5 million series C funding or equivalent to 327 billion Rupiah led by PERSOL Holdings, the technology-based recruiting platform Glints plans to focus on accelerating their business in Indonesia.

As a country with the largest population in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is considered capable of producing young workforce. Moreover, with a median age of 29 years, it indicates a young workforce that is ready and adaptive for the future. Coupled with an increasingly skilled talent pool, Indonesia is able to stand out from other economies.

"In the near future, we will expand our geographic reach to other cities including Surabaya and Bandung. In parallel, we will also invest in Expert Class Glints product, to enable our talent community to engage with experts from various fields and help professionals improve their expertise," Glints' Co-founder & CEO, Oswald Yeo said.

Apart from Indonesia, Glints is to focus on empowering the career development of 120 million professionals in Southeast Asia and to solve the regional talent crisis, by building more teams, features and solutions in the Glints Talent Ecosystem. They also plans to deepen the company's footprint in Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan.

The Series C round includes participation from investors such as Monk's Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, as well as angel investors including Binny Bansal (co-founder of Flipkart), and Xiaoyin Zhang (Ex-Goldman Sachs TMT China Head & Partner who brought Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba go-public).

"With PERSOL Group's commercial distribution and experience in Asia and the Glints talent platform with their leading technology, we will empower Southeast Asian professionals and help solve the talent crisis in Southeast Asia," PERSOL Asia Pacific's CEO, Takayuki Yamazaki said.

Pandemic and business growth

During the pandemic the company observed an immediate decline in local hiring business activity as companies suspended their recruiting activities. On the other side, the pandemic has helped to accelerate the future of employment, including the trend of remote working and is driving major changes in recruitment as companies become more accustomed to working with distributed teams.

"In addition, many Singaporean and regional companies are now more comfortable recruiting Indonesian talent. This has allowed Glints to maintain strong revenue growth despite the pandemic."

By 2020, Glints managed to double its annual revenue. With the pandemic accelerating the future of employment and the future of hiring, it is considered as an opportunity to sustain a trend in annual income that has grown triple digit percentage every year for the past 3 years.

"The pandemic has accelerated the future of jobs and caused major changes in the labor market," Oswald said.

Officially launched in Indonesia in early 2016, Glints currently has around 7000 active job lists per month and 4 million professionals who have visited the platform every month. On average, Glints recorded that their clients are capable to perform the successful recruitment process and faster in 28 days, compared to the industry standard of 40-50 days with recruitment fees up to 40% -100% cheaper by utilizing their platform.

In Indonesia, there are many job marketplace platforms that offer recruitment services with different added values. For example, Kalibrr as a recruiting company from the Philippines is available in Indonesia since 2016. They combine an AI-based recruitment platform and employer branding services to help companies demonstrate their values, attract the right candidates, and realize a seamless process.

As local players there are also several platforms that provide similar service such as Urbanhire, Ekrut, Nusatalent, and several others. During the pandemic, they were also quite active in helping companies to digitize HR systems. For example, Urbanhire positioned itself not only as a job opening portal, but HR technology and talent solutions, thanks to their strategic partnership with Mercer.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian