How HeadHunter hh.ru bought, or the Legend of Khazrat Kharitonov

    Now HeadHunter and hh.ru are almost synonymous, but this has not always been the case. When the National Job Club and Job.rbc.ru merged into HeadHunter in 2002, the headhunter.ru domain belonged to RBC. By 2005, relations with RBC were strained, the domain still belonged to them, and to protect themselves from hostile takeovers, virovets offered to buy a short two-letter letter hh.ru. With it, our service could calmly continue working if RBC took away the long option.

    At that time, we had two news - good and bad. The bad thing was that the domain was busy, which even for the distant 2005 was not surprising. But there was a good one - a cybersquatter owned it, which means that the domain could be quickly bought. Unfortunately, for an Internet company whose name consists of two words starting with "h", and even living under the wing of a rich RBC, this meant a price of several tens of thousands of dollars, and we did not have such an amount at that time. Therefore, we decided to resort to tricks and created the legend of Khazrat Kharitonov.


    (Mid-2000 HeadHunter retro screenshot)


    Khazrat Kharitonov, according to legend, is a friend of Olga Brukovskaya, our marketing director at that time (a person who was not yet public, and therefore perfectly suitable for this operation). Hazrat had a birthday, so Olga and her friends decided to give him a personal website, and for that they really needed a beautiful domain based on the first letters of the name and surname of the birthday person. Naturally, Olga here acted as a private person, under a different name, with a different phone number - everything is like in a real detective story.

    A clever cybersquatter would never sell such a tasty domain to an unknown lady when HeadHunter aimed at it, so we abandoned the purchase ahead of time and stopped showing any interest.
    And suddenly, after some time, Olga and her touching story about the fortieth anniversary appeared on the horizon with a proposal to buy. Of course, the cybersquatter did not immediately believe in the legend, but after several meetings in the cafe he succumbed to female charm, surrendered and, preferring a tit in his hands, sold the domain three times cheaper than HeadHunter suggested.

    Then relations with RBC were improved, they ceded the headhunter.ru domain to us, but as it turned out, hh.ru is much better, and after rebranding it completely became part of our logo and the main domain of the company.

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