The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) reported that it had instituted an administrative case against the three largest vacancy services - hh.ru, rabota.ru and superjob.ru: they created obstacles in market access for companies that provide software for automated staff recruitment.

FAS complained to one of the developers of automated recruitment. The developer claimed that the service’s customers (employers and recruitment agencies) faced a problem, writes FAS: the service, referring to its own terms of use, began to block employers ’accounts if they use other automated selection services. The name of the developer and the service, which began to block the accounts of employers, FAS does not.

Co-founder of Stafory (a service that allows you to simplify the recruitment process with the help of recruiters) Alexander Uraksin on his Facebook page later wrote that the case was opened after his company's complaint to the FAS and the complaint was filed only to HeadHunter.

In early February, HeadHunter (hh.ru) started blocking accounts for using extensions from Huntflow, FriendWork and others, wrote vc.ru. "In 2018, we were faced with several challenging attempts to download the database, so we had to go to action to protect our users," the HeadHunter representative explained at the time.

FAS discovered that restrictions on the use of automated recruitment software are contained in the HeadHunter, rabota.ru and superjob.ru rules, and revealed the facts of blocking such services.

HeadHunter refrained from commenting on the anti-monopoly case prior to receiving the official notification of the FAS, but stated that they operate in accordance with Russian law and that the summary database is registered as an intangible asset and the company's intellectual property.

The representative of rabota.ru also said that the company would not comment on the matter before receiving the official documents from the FAS.

Contact a representative of superjob.ru failed. In early February, HeadHunter became a co-owner of Skillaz's staffing automation service - about 25% of the company, a recruiter representative told Vedomosti. HeadHunter also sued Stafory (Robot Vera automation service) - he retrieved a resume from the hh.ru database and gave access to them without the knowledge of HeadHunter, but the court rejected the claim.

In January 2018, HeadHunter won a lawsuit against FriendWork, which used a recruiter’s resume.

The Internet Initiatives Development Fund estimates the demand for computer-aided recruitment technologies in Russia at 16 billion rubles. per year, and is satisfied by about 1 billion rubles. The main players in this market, in addition to Skillaz, are Stafory, JungleJobs, HRSpace, AmazingHiring, and others.