I used to work for Dice, the pri­ma­ry rev­enue dri­ver for DHI. It was a long long time ago, and the job board world was very dif­fer­ent. So take the fol­low­ing with a grain of salt (as in fact you should always do from any self-pro­claimed pun­dit of our indus­try!).

DHI recent­ly did some­thing that had me scratch­ing my (ever reced­ing) fore­head. They invest­ed in The­Muse. That’s right, The­Muse, as in the employ­er brand­ing job board aimed at the styl­ish job seek­er (i.e., mil­lenials). If you’re like me (and appar­ent­ly the news hit Chad and Cheese the same way), you imme­di­ate­ly said…huh? I mean, until very recent­ly, DHI’s finan­cial per­for­mance had been ane­mic, Dice’s sales had been declin­ing to flat, and only Clear­ance­Jobs seemed to offer a glim­mer of growth for the com­pa­ny. So – try­ing to sur­vive, push­ing past the pan­dem­ic, and then….”Hey, let’s invest in some­thing. Not some­thing tech, that would be too pre­dictable. Let’s invest in a glossy employ­er brand­ing site!!!!”

You can just imag­ine the dis­cus­sion in the DHI board room. It must have been late at night. A Fri­day. Maybe the quar­ter­ly finan­cials had just come through show­ing some mod­est growth. They’re think­ing, ‘yeah, let’s update our guid­ance, show some growth for the 3rd quar­ter – and then let’s blow every­one’s mind by doing some­thing total­ly crazy!!!’.

Well, it could’ve hap­pened that way…

Let’s turn to DHI and see what their pub­lic expla­na­tion in the press release was: “The invest­ment will be used to sup­port the expan­sion of The Muse’s prod­uct devel­op­ment and sales efforts to meet the increas­ing mar­ket demand for its unique val­ues based employ­er dis­cov­ery offer­ings.  Terms of the planned trans­ac­tion are not being dis­closed at this time. In addi­tion to the invest­ment, the two com­pa­nies will work togeth­er to devel­op joint sales, thought lead­er­ship and prod­uct solu­tions to bet­ter serve their respec­tive stakeholders…”We believe The Muse is a true leader in pro­vid­ing solu­tions that authen­ti­cal­ly sup­port this dis­cov­ery process with great ben­e­fits for both employ­ers and can­di­dates.  The Muse is an ide­al part­ner for Dice as we look to accel­er­ate our own abil­i­ty to deliv­er these same insights to tech­nol­o­gists cus­tomized for their spe­cif­ic inter­ests,” said Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group, Inc.”.

Ok. Right. Those are lots of words, all right. Can you fig­ure them out? I can’t. Here’s what I know. The­Muse has tak­en in fair­ly large amounts of VC fund­ing – enough than I am sur­prised $3M is worth talk­ing about. DHI has been strug­gling for a while, and Zeile is still basi­cal­ly the ‘new guy’ try­ing to make his mark.

But real­ly. Even if you believe the pub­lic pro­nounce­ments (expert tip: don’t believe the pub­lic pro­nounce­ments!), the stat­ed rea­sons don’t make much sense. Why would­n’t DHI use the mon­ey to acquire a smart, up and com­ing recruit­ing tech­nol­o­gy provider? Or even a tech-ori­ent­ed site that isn’t a job board? Or even (gasp!) rein­vest it into the com­pa­ny itself, to grow over the long term? Well, I don’t know, because I don’t work there. (But some of you do – and if you want to whis­per answers in my ear, I’ll nev­er tell! Promise!!).

Joel thinks it’s a DHI mid-life cri­sis. Chad thinks it’s a lack of focus. I think…my Fri­day night sce­nario is look­ing bet­ter. Dumb things hap­pen late at night, as we all know. Chad and Cheese want to kick out Art and become co-CEOs. I would say…I’ve been there, and I can guar­an­tee you don’t want to do that.

You got any ideas? Let me know. I’m going back to scratch­ing my fore­head!!!

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PS: Have you tak­en the 2021–22 Recruit­ing Sites Sur­vey? No? Then now’s the time!! Click here!!!