However, I’m not sure what you’re talking about regarding VietnamWorks “once lost their entire database.” I’ve been with the company since May 2006 and this has never happened, either with our CV database or jobs on the site. You’re right that it would be an incredibly unprofessional event if it were to happen. We’re very careful to backup our data regularly.

I’m also not sure what you mean by “went out to buy them back” either. To my knowledge, VietnamWorks has *never* bought CVs, certainly not on my watch. We have, however, had people steal our CVs by using robots to scrape content off our site. One guy copied over 20,000 CVs in one day. We put a stop to that last year when we changed our CV viewing policy and put rate limiters into effect.

Thanks for following VietnamWorks! I hope we have the opportunity to help you find your dream job.

Cheers,
charvey

1/ “Highly profitable” often refers to high net/operating margin. And job recruitment is a low margin business (which is NOT necessarily bad - Amazon is a low margin business but they are doing well in general)

2/ I am not criticizing job recruitment business - I’m just questioning Vietnamworks’ performance and business models.

Below are some of the world’s top recruitment companies.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MWW
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MAN
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHI

Monster is arguably the top performer and their operating margin for 2008 is 12.65% (RBI 9.11% and Manpower 2.36%).

Operating margin is one of the key metrics to evaluate the operating performance and eventually profitability of a business. The only thing can help offset a low margin is extremely high volume. Take Amazon for example. According to this http://www.google.com/finance?q=amazon, their operating margin and net margin are 4.39% and 3.41%, respectively. However, because Amazon has such huge volume of transactions and hence enormous revenue, they are doing pretty well in terms of profit.

3/ In conclusion, because:

a/ job recruitment in general is by nature a low margin business (some small segments might have higher margin but I’m just saying the job recruitment as a whole)

b/ job recruitment is a CYCLICAL business - people hire more during economic boom and hire less in recession (yes, in recession firms don’t stop recruiting but demand is much less than during good times).

c/ while the number of firms that have demand for white collar staff in developing economies including Vietnam is often on the rise, the pace is slow and eventually there’s a growth ceiling.

d/ The supply of white collar staff (from entry level to senior level) in Vietnam is extremely limited. And Vietnamworks is not doing much to increase this supply pool.

…the only way to have a profitable job recruitment business is to keep operating expenses as low as possible. Has Vietnamworks done a good job with this at all? Maybe you want to ask the once-glorious Indochina Capital, who invested approx. 6 mil in Vietnamworks, only to see all the money burned and no sight of profit yet.

I think when Long@Vietlog said “high profitable”, he meant the potential to make money of Vietnamworks. Don’t you think that Vietnamworks is a good business?