(Yicai Global) Sept. 12 -- Meituan Dianping is building a recruiting platform Mantou Zhipin to help its small and mid-sized vendors solve their staffing difficulties, tech media 36Kr reported today, as the firm later confirmed.

Mantou Zhipin is a recruitment platform for blue-collar workers and will help Meituan Dianping's vendors with staff recruitment in the initial phase and is likely to become an integrated and open hiring platform later, per an informed source.

The platform, which is undergoing debugging, targets many life services fields such as food and beverage, hotels, recreation, sports and fitness and wedding services, a company insider stated, adding job-seekers can look for vacancies on the Meituan and Dianping apps and Mantou Zhipin's WeChat applet when the platform activates.

The company started to focus on vendor-related business last year, an industry insider noted, saying the firm provides such services such as selling coupons for vendors, delivering take-out to vendors' buyers and helping vendors connect to the upstream and downstream on their supply chains via its Kuailv business-to-business platform, so that for it to now venture into the recruitment sector is not at all surprising.

Meituan Dianping, which formed from the merger of China's two biggest lifestyle service providers in 2015, had 380 million users in the 12 months up to September last year, with 5.5 million active shop owners, according to a firm earnings report.

The Tencent Holdings-backed group listed in Hong Kong that same month, raising HKD33 billion (USD4.2 billion).

Editor: Ben Armour