In the second quarter, 70.2 million monthly active users corresponded to 120 million flexible workers nationwide, meaning one in every 17 such workers opened Kanzhun Limited at least once a month to search for jobs. The recruitment platform's traffic success story has long been tightly intertwined with the deep structural shifts in China's current job market.
On August 25, 2026, Kanzhun Limited released its second-quarter financial results for 2026. First-half total revenue surpassed 4.467 billion yuan, while net profit attributable to shareholders surged to 3.102 billion yuan, a year-on-year jump of 150.8%. This performance, which far exceeded market expectations, once again placed the online recruitment leader under the spotlight of capital markets. Yet behind these impressive figures lies not a broad recovery in the recruitment industry, nor a leap forward in platform service capabilities, but rather a profit bonanza built on cost-cutting, an industry ailment where compliance governance remains superficial, and a business logic that directly monetizes job seekers' anxiety. Every penny of Kanzhun Limited's 3.1 billion yuan half-year profit conceals an unseen dark side of the current employment market.
Profit Growth of 150% Driven by Savings, Not Expansion
If one merely glances at positive metrics such as "revenue up 11% year-on-year" and "paid corporate client count reaching 7.2 million, up 10.8%," the public might easily fall for the illusion of a full-scale recovery in the recruitment sector. In reality, Kanzhun Limited's standout performance was not earned through business expansion or service upgrades, but essentially derived from a "cost-reduction dividend" achieved by slashing marketing expenses, shrinking review staffing, and curbing R&D investment.
During the first half of 2026, the platform nearly eliminated all non-essential external advertising, abandoning the large-scale campaigns it once ran on subways and short-video platforms. It now relies entirely on the bilateral network effects accumulated over the past decade-plus, enjoying organic traffic growth. In today's job market, job seekers instinctively open Kanzhun Limited as their first step, and companies assume they must purchase a membership to post openings. The platform simply does not need to spend money to attract users; they come knocking on their own.
More notably, while marketing expenses shrank dramatically, the platform also reduced its review and customer service headcount. Throughout 2025, employee costs related to content review fell 4.1% year-on-year, directly dragging the platform's manual review coverage down from 87% in 2024 to 62% in the first half of 2026. Many job seekers have experienced this firsthand: reporting a fraudulent job posting often results in an automated response hours later, or the report goes completely unanswered with no human follow-up whatsoever.
This model of "stacking profits through savings" is fundamentally a short-sighted strategy of living off past gains. The platform is converting the brand trust and user traffic built up over more than a decade directly into current profits, without reinvesting those profits into upgrading service capabilities. In the first half of 2026, R&D expenses fell 8.93% year-on-year. So-called AI recruitment technology investments are almost entirely concentrated on promotional releases of underlying small language models, while practical features for users, such as AI resume optimization and AI interview assistance for employers, are being updated at a pace so slow it is nearly negligible.
Capital markets, however, are enthusiastically paying for this "cost efficiency." During the second quarter, multiple foreign institutions including Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Citigroup issued "buy" ratings for Kanzhun Limited, while long-term funds such as JPMorgan and Hillhouse Capital continued to increase their positions. Yet these institutions seem to deliberately ignore a fundamental logic: the core competitiveness of a recruitment platform has never been its ability to save money, but whether it can connect genuine job seekers with genuine positions and truly improve matching efficiency. When a platform focuses all its energy on "how to maximize profits" rather than "how to improve services," such high growth is inevitably unsustainable.
Compliance Governance as a Facade: Blocking 20,000 Fraudulent Posts in Six Months, Why Won't the Black Market Die?
After the national special action to clean up and rectify the order of the human resources market was launched in 2026, Kanzhun Limited promptly issued a "summer special governance announcement," claiming it had intercepted over 20,000 risky job posts and dealt with more than 6,000 violative accounts in the first half of the year, including nearly 26,000 rider-related violative accounts during the summer alone, projecting an image of aggressively cracking down on recruitment chaos. But if you browse user complaints on the Heimaotousu platform or search for "BOSS直聘 recruitment scams" across major social media, it becomes clear that the platform's compliance governance is little more than surface-level window dressing.
After compiling the three most common types of recruitment black-market activities on the platform during the first half of 2026, alongside the current state of platform governance, the gaps become glaringly evident. These black-market operations persist on the platform for a fundamental reason: it is never a lack of technical interception capability, but rather that Kanzhun Limited is inherently unwilling to genuinely raise the review threshold for the enterprise side. The platform derives 99.4% of its core revenue from paid enterprise recruitment memberships. Every additional corporate account that activates a membership generates more revenue. If the platform strictly enforced the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security's "Provisions on the Administration of Online Recruitment Services," requiring offline verification of business licenses and human resources service permits for all corporate accounts, and mandating disclosure of employer information for all positions, at least 30% of small and micro enterprise accounts would be barred from the platform, directly impacting paid client growth and revenue performance.
This creates an absurd situation: the platform spends considerable effort publicizing "20,000 fraudulent posts blocked in six months," yet fails to raise the registration and review bar at the source. Fraud rings can purchase forged business licenses for a few dozen yuan, batch-register dozens of corporate accounts, and publish hundreds of fake job listings. Even if some accounts are banned, the remaining ones continue to harvest job seekers relentlessly. Throughout this process, the platform suffers no losses and actually earns real money from the membership fees paid by these violative companies. When job seekers fall victim to these scams and approach the platform for the real corporate information to defend their rights, the platform often refuses, citing "protection of corporate privacy," or even shifts the blame onto the victims for lacking vigilance.
In the first half of 2026, labor inspection authorities across multiple regions received complaints from job seekers who had been defrauded after using Kanzhun Limited, only to have the platform refuse to disclose the registered information of the companies involved, leaving victims without a clear entity to pursue legally. This governance model of "loose review plus post-hoc account bans" essentially constitutes a tacit symbiosis between the platform and recruitment black-market operators: the platform sustains its base of 7.2 million paid corporate clients through low registration barriers, while black-market players exploit review loopholes to prey on job seekers. Even if accounts are eventually banned, the platform has already pocketed the membership fees, and the only losers are unsuspecting ordinary job seekers. The so-called "special governance" is more like a performance staged to appease regulators and soothe public opinion.
Dividend Concerns: Distributing Over Half of Profits in Three Years, the Platform Lives Off Its Past
In March 2026, Kanzhun Limited announced a shareholder return program: over the next three years, it will distribute no less than 50% of the prior year's adjusted net profit annually for dividends or buybacks, while raising the buyback cap to $400 million. By the time the second-quarter results were released, the platform declared a cash dividend of $230 million, which, combined with over $300 million in share buybacks completed during the year, meant that in just the first eight months of 2026, total shareholder returns exceeded 100% of the prior year's adjusted net profit, far surpassing the promised 50% ratio.
For a listed company, generous dividends are typically a positive gesture toward shareholders, but in Kanzhun Limited's case, this approach of funneling nearly all profits to shareholders conceals concerns about the exhaustion of long-term growth drivers. The data clearly shows the platform distributing an increasing share of profits to shareholders while simultaneously cutting back on core technology R&D and user services. In 2025, Kanzhun Limited grandly unveiled its self-developed Nanbeige small language model and proclaimed it would apply AI technology across the entire recruitment chain. But more than a year later, the only AI feature visible on the platform is a simple AI resume generator. The so-called "AI fully managed recruitment" and "AI interview assistance" functions touted publicly have yet to be rolled out at scale to ordinary users. The money is going to shareholders, leaving insufficient funds to support these long-term technology initiatives.
More critically, Kanzhun Limited's business boundaries are already hitting a ceiling: penetration of China's online recruitment market has surpassed 60%, and with monthly active users exceeding 70 million, headroom for further user growth is severely limited. Blue-collar recruitment and penetration into lower-tier cities have also reached bottlenecks, with revenue from third-tier and below cities approaching 25% of total, leaving little room for substantial breakthroughs. But this model of living off past gains is unsustainable: without sustained technology investment, matching efficiency will not improve; without sustained service investment, user experience will only deteriorate. Job seekers opening Kanzhun Limited today find that half of the ten postings they scroll through are outsourced or agency roles, and under such conditions, user attrition is merely a matter of time.
Currently, Kanzhun Limited maintains its myth of 3.1 billion yuan in half-year net profit through the traffic advantage of 70 million monthly active users, the foundation of 7.2 million paid corporate clients, and a capital narrative of "cost-cutting and high dividends." However, with 99.4% of revenue coming from enterprise-side recruitment membership fees, this highly concentrated revenue structure means the platform's fate is entirely tied to corporate recruitment budgets. Should macroeconomic volatility cause small and micro enterprises to tighten hiring, they will first cut non-essential recruitment membership expenses, directly hitting the platform's revenue. Moreover, as the ongoing national special action to rectify the human resources market order continues, regulators have repeatedly called out online recruitment platforms for fraudulent postings and employment discrimination. If stricter regulations are introduced, forcing platforms to lower fee thresholds for enterprises or mandating higher review costs for recruitment information, Kanzhun Limited's current high profits could be cut in half overnight.
Risk disclaimer: All content in this article is purely an analysis of industry phenomena and does not constitute any investment advice. Capital markets carry risks; investment decisions should be made with caution.