Office for the Protection of Competition has agreed on commitments with Alma Career, job portal system will be more accessible to competitors

The Office for the Protection of Competition has closed administrative proceedings concerning the possible abuse of a dominant position by the Alma Career Group in the field of advertising on job portals after the party to the proceedings submitted commitments that will ensure interoperability with competing services provided in the markets concerned.

"This is a typical case of a potential local digital dominant player whose activities could have had a negative impact on the national market. It is much appreciated that it was quickly resolved through commitments that will open-up the market to competing undertakings," said Vice-Chairman Kamil Nejezchleb.

The Office investigated possible abuse of dominant position by Alma Career Czechia s.r.o. and Alma Career Oy (hereinafter referred to as the “Alma Career Group”) in the Czech market for the provision of advertising services on online job portals. The Alma Career Group operates the best-known job portals jobs.cz and prace.cz, while also being a producer of recruitment management software (known as ATS). In administrative proceedings, the Office investigated suspicions that the Alma Career group was abusing its position and, through price and technical barriers, making it difficult for competing ATS and job portals to connect to Alma Career's systems. This could have discouraged advertisers from using the services of competitors of the investigated undertaking.

During the administrative proceedings, the Alma Career Group submitted several proposals for commitments, which the Office subjected to market tests. The final version of Alma Career's commitments consists of (i) implementing a two-way API enabling fully automated interconnection of competing ATSs with ACC job portals (enabling automatic placement of job positions on ACC job portals from competing ATSs and obtaining responses from job applicants from the ACC job portal to this ATS); (ii) implementing an API enabling the automatic receipt of responses from applicants for job positions published on competing job portals into the ATS operated by ACC; and (iii) inclusion of the costs of developing and operating all APIs in the prices for the services of job portals and ATS operated by ACC (i.e., no separate fees for connecting ACC systems with competing systems).

According to the Office, such commitments will ensure effective competition in the relevant market, as their implementation will eliminate the potentially harmful situation within a relatively short period of time. The Office will continuously monitor the effectiveness of the implementation of the imposed commitments.

 

Press Unit of the Office
25/214 - S0273/2024