Warburg supports Liepin's O2O expansion

The company has vowed to adopt an online-to-offline (O2O) business strategy, creating a career development platform to connect corporate employers, headhunters, and job seekers. It is a departure from the traditional model of providing recruitment information and relying on online advertising fees for the bulk of income. Liepin wants to improve user experience.

"We are not only a recruitment website, but also a career development platform, which means we create online forums for job seekers to share their experience of interviews, or we provide industry views on certain professions," says Jessica Ba, general manager of branding and marketing at Liepin.

In order to develop the offline business, the company plans to establish a data center of all job seekers registered on the site and have staff call up candidates to update resumes and find out more about employment expectations, so as to better brief corporate clients. Ba notes that corporates are already the main driver of revenue.

Liepin has a database of more than 10 million professionals and 100,000 registered headhunters. A client base of 100,000 companies pays an individual fee of more than RMB10,000 ($1,600) per year, Rick Dai, the company's founder and CEO, told local media.

Liepin, formerly Lietou.com, was founded in 2006 with an ambition to become a social media site for professionals along the lines of LinkedIn. Two years later it switched to the headhunter model. Matrix Partners China then put in about $10 million across two rounds of funding. It also participated in the latest round.

The new funding will be also used to provide mobile services, following rivals 51job, Zhaopin and ChinaHR. Three quarters of China's internet users go online via mobile devices; mobile internet is the fastest-growing segment of the internet economy, worth RMB55 billion in gross merchandise value in 2012, nearly double the previous year's figure, according to iReserach.

"Warburg Pincus has been following the internet-based recruitment sector closely in recent years and was impressed with Liepin's unique business model and the disruptive change it has brought to the sector," says Julian Cheng, managing director at head of North Asia technology, media and telecom investment at the firm.

The Lietou to Liepin change happened earlier this year in order to compete with LinkedIn. The US player has launched a local joint venture with Sequoia China and CBC Capital; it also unveiled a simplified Chinese site to connect with the more than 140 million Chinese professionals with its 277 million global member base. Asked about the competitive threat, Ba simply says, "[Linkedin] is not as familiar with the Chinese market as we are."

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Technology
• Venture
• Warburg Pincus Asia
• China
• Growth capital