Adding an AI and RPA business to a pure job-ad company (2019)

Can a company that sells media sell work?

At the centre of this decision is the re-measurement of how far the product called a job advertisement actually reaches, taken from the side of the customer’s difficulties. For a company short of hands, posting a vacancy handles only the entrance. Scheduling interviews and building a recruitment page are labour the operating floor carries after applications arrive, and that had until now been placed outside the medium. What Dip chose in 2019 was to extend its product into that outside, using the sales channel into small and mid-sized firms that job advertising had already built. Rather than searching for a new market, it can be seen as going after unprocessed work sitting right beside the existing customer.

That said, an organisation that sells media and one that sells business systems differ both in the people they need and in how they stay involved after delivery. That the DX business reaches a 50% margin with 209 people shows the product is selling, but it also leaves the question of whether the same efficiency holds at several times that scale. To smooth out the sensitivity to the economic cycle that the pandemic exposed, the second pillar has to grow large enough to absorb the swings of the media business. Whether starting from somewhere as close as the work surrounding job advertising guarantees speed of expansion, or instead fixes in advance the range it can reach, appears to be something the next several years will show.