Glints Plans in Indonesia After Obtaining Series C Funding

After securing a series C funding of $22,5 million or equivalent to IDR 327 billion led by PERSOL Holdings, a technology-based recruitment platform Glints plan to focus on accelerating their business in Indonesia.

As the country with the largest population in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is considered capable of creating a young workforce. Moreover, with a median age of 29 years, it shows 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 economic countries.

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

In addition to focusing on Indonesia, Glints also wants to empower 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 Southeast Asia. Glints Talent Ecosystem. They also have 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, and angel investors include Binny Bansal (co-founder of Flipkart), and Xiaoyin Zhang (Ex-Goldman Sachs TMT China Head & Partner who brought Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to public).

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

Pandemic and business growth

During the pandemic the company noted there was an immediate decline in local recruiting business activity as companies freeze/suspend their hiring activities. But on the other hand, the pandemic is also helping to accelerate the future of work, including trends working remotely and 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 allows Glints to maintain strong revenue growth despite the pandemic."

In 2020, Glints managed to double its annual revenue. With the pandemic accelerating the future of employment and the future of hiring, it is seen as an opportunity to maintain the trend of annual earnings growing at triple digit percentages every year for the last 3 years.

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

Officially launched in Indonesia in early 2016, Glints currently has around 7000 active job listings per month and 4 million professionals who have visited the platform every month. Glints noted that on average their clients are able to successfully and faster recruiting processes within 28 days, compared to the industry standard of 40-50 days with recruitment costs up to 40%-100% cheaper by utilizing their platform.

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

For local players there are also several platforms that handle similar needs such as Urbanhire, Ekrut, Nusatalent, and several others. During the pandemic they are also quite active in helping companies to do HR system digitization. For example what Urbanhire does, now they are not only positioning themselves as a job vacancy portal, but also HR technology and talent solutions, thanks to their strategic partnership with Mercer.