Online Job Portals in India – it’s time to change the rules!
Something that I am not a big fan of is the attitude of businesses believing in CYA (Covering Your Ass) before giving something new to the users. There are many examples of the same – Travel portals (Yatra, ClearTrip, MakeMyTrip, TravelGuru, …) and Social Networks (Jhoom, Minglebox, Yaari) have done that – where they are, practically, building the exact same thing. Everybody claims that they have a different way of approaching the problem but they will do so AFTER they are done with doing what others have done. Though I do understand the reasons for the same and realize that it’s important to ensure the survival of a business before being adventurous, it doesn’t necessarily translate to me liking the approach. Not to forget mentioning that most of these companies either run out of cash or the business model changes by the time they are done ‘perfecting’ the existing solution.
Lately I spent a bit of time looking at the indian job portals and the trend continues there. Naukri and MonsterIndia continue to lead the race and the argument on who is bigger doesn’t cease to stop. My personal experience says that there is little to choose between them and we have an account with both these providers (that I am dying to get rid of as soon as other providers match up in the resume count). Both Naukri and Monster work decently well for people at entry and junior level but the job consultants still work better for senior level people. There are other job portals like JobsAhead (acquired by Monster), TimesJobs, CareerIndia, ClickJobs, etc which are also trying to have a piece of pie (which is substantially big). ClickJobs impresses the most because of its user-interface, some premium services and customer-focus.
Job board is another way the companies in the US have targeted the market, specifically for a niche segment. 37Signals and GigaOm have that offering in the US and the similar stuff has been provided in India by JobMilan (I am sure there are others also but I am just not aware).
Yet another site that I want to mention here is CampusChai which is operating in the same space but claims to be focusing more on the college campus placements than the general job search.
First impression: I was pretty excited after reading the byline but the first page disappointed a bit. The employer registration didn’t work for a long time – the AJAX call was made displaying the status but the page did nothing more for the first couple of minutes. The site, in general, has a clean interface which is very encouraging and shows signs that the stress will be laid on the usability and not the plethora of features (hats off, if you can keep it that way).
When I signed-in to the site as an employer, this is the screen I saw:
The site has a pretty good use of AJAX which makes it highly interactive and responsive. I liked the usability aspects of the site which tells me that the implementation team has done a pretty good job. What I didn’t like is the fact that even though they want to specialize in providing tools for managing campus placements easier (that also is a tough job because of the education needed for the college placement officers – who, in my opinion, will not be too easy to convince), they started with being yet another job portal. Of course, the number of resumes is also very limited currently which doesn’t make it really valuable currently. And the dynamic display of jobs in the front page can be done away with – it’s distracting to say the least (changing the job on page-refresh is ok, abusing AJAX is not). It’s early days but I see some good signs there – like they have a blog at http://campuschai.wordpress.com. My recommendation: Come on guys, you need to live up to the reputation of ‘Campus Recruitment done better‘, as claimed in your byline. Leave the act of following to the big guys – you can’t beat them with the unchanged rules. Change the rules – that is your best bet to win it!
Oh, and as is the trend these days, they also have a promotion which gives you a PS2 if you are the one who finish the contest with the maximum number of points. I am a loyal customer of Microsoft and don’t want PS2 – do I have a choice? 
Ashish,
Thanks for taking the time to review CampusChai and for your suggestions. I am one of the co-founders of CampusChai. We definitely want to be the platform for campus recruitment in India and are actively working on adding features to support that statement. We released the site in its current form to get some initial feedback from our users and to incrementally add new features. We wanted to launch something that was smaller in scope and planned rather than launching something that was full of holes. Ultimately, every release we make is driven by one and only one goal – A real product that people can use. We are very close to completing new features relevant to campus recruitment, but it will not be released until we are 100% satisfied. I can assure you that everything we do will be rinsed and repeated until a majority of our users are satisfied.
Thanks again for your time. Feedback like this helps us stay agile and focused.
Well there is another site Jobs4Freshers.com has been around for a year now and has slowly and steadily built itself. Have a look.. I hope u like what you see. In my opinion what ever the technology ajax php or asp.. what matters is you get the recruiters the kind of candidates they look for and get candidates the jobs they look for. Only when you do both those things well is when you have a good business model.
Sunder – will be looking forward to the updates!
Rajiv – I had seen Jobs4Freshers before. And, I totally agree with you that eventually it’s not about the technology but whether you have sufficient data and eyeballs or not. That is the advantage most of the traditional big companies have – IndiaTimes is a classical example (I think it’s one of the worst managed site and yet is highly successful because it has achieved a critical mass that not many sites has). But when you are small and starting – you have no choice but to do everything well. Usability becomes extremely important then. Jobs4Freshers is nice – the challenge remains in reaching the critical mass, I believe.
Job portal should understand that Data base driven model of recruitment can be stretched up to a limit only than there is a saturation .they need to look for additional revenue and services .
there was a funny debate at contentsutra and venturewoods about which is a better job site monster of naukri ? i think there is no time for that debate they should focus on launching new services now . naukri has zero or no return value for anyone who is in a good job happily employed . they can do something to entice them to change . like wageexchange.com or payscale.com for India .
This was a logical progression for Naukri but some how they seems to be more interested in 99acers . with their IPO just round the corner i think they will be hard pressed for new revenue streams than probably they will look toward it . but given the experience of Bixee and Infoedge’s overall reputation for relationship management with other player i guess they can’t pull it . Naukri at the core is a lala company .
Prashant, what is a “lala company”? Does it in a sense mean “all puff. no stuff”. I just hope I didn’t misinterpret your statement.
Ashish/Rajiv, I respectfully disagree with you both when you say that success of a site eventually is not about technology and I’m quite surprised to note the analogy with IndiaTimes. Are you folks saying that no matter how crappy the site is, people would stick with it no matter what? Absolutely not, IMO. In such a case, people would start looking for other options and if they find a site that offers better usability(built using better technology) then tehy will migrate – in droves and they will never even look back at the crappy one. Remember, first impression is and will always remain the best impression no matter how hard one tries to improve.
By the way, at least, I personally have stopped visiting such sites with less news and more ugly ads for quite a while now.
Ashish:
You write in the starting that the new guys in the indian web space are covering their ass first and also later(in reply) u say that indiatimes and the likes had reached a critical mass which made them still a strong player. So I wonder what things had Flickr going for them? They came in at a stage when there were so many other photo sharing portals already in the market – they were not a yahoo company then or a google labs product – where did they get all the eye balls from and how did they succeed? (Your answer may actually help me out in one of my class assignments!)
hey startups you got me wrong.. I certainly did not mean one should compromise on usability. But i strongly feel that for any job site its important to keep two groups happy. one is the candidates and the other are the employers. Yes good usability would keep them happy and great technology would really make things easy for them but you tell me if you were an employer and i had a job site with 20000 resumes and great technology or 20 lakh resumes and mediocore technology which would you choose? I think giving employers what they desire and giving candidates what they desire should be the core focus. Research should be done on the pains in the jobs segment. And if the solution to the pains is great technology so be it. if it means i need to realign my business model so be it too! Just thought id clarify my stand
Prashant – almost all the ‘successful’ dot-com indian companies are diversifying – Naukri / BharatMatrimony group. I have heard good things about Sanjeev Bhikhchandani, haven’t still met him though – so I will stop short of saying that its a ‘lala’ company
Doesn’t mean that I don’t agree to your other points.
Startups – No, I am not saying that people will stick to a site always. I was only saying that they will do so TILL they dont have a decent alternative. I am stuck with Naukri / Monster because I dont have a decent alternative. I like a couple of other sites but they don’t have sufficient resumes right now. I see that Rajiv also made the same comment.
Rahul – the story with Flickr is very interesting. They did 2 things very different and very right:
1. They approached the problem in a drastically different way – as compared to other photo sites. For example – their stress was a lot on ‘finding and sharing’ photos rather than ‘uploading and sharing’ photos. Given the fact that there are many more ‘consumers’ than ‘producers’, flickr was much more viral.
2. They listened to their users and updated their products very quickly – people feel good when they see that within weeks their recommendations have been implemented. That was the beauty of it. Did you know that they used to be a gaming site based on the photo-sharing, when they started?
There are quite a few blogs / articles on this – google around and you will find interesting stuff on the same.
Hi,
This is a new portal to try and provide pain reliefs to the various constituents in the HR domain of IT industry. It is not just a job portal but this feature will be a part. Currently, it is the base model and will be scaled up as we go forward. Your comments.
Sorry, the site address is http://www.ithrzone.com
lets face it guys – job portals in India are a big market today. On May 17 source Zee news Number of Indians seeking jobs online had reached 6.5 mn. Which makes all business sense and answers why such start ups. Last heard after clickjobs from the house of Bharat Matrimony there is another major start in the foray – un-named so far; from the house of Shaadi.com.
Kashyap – you are right – there clearly is a need for online job portals. But eventually, there will be only a few companies who can cater to a market successfully UNLESS a lot of them choose separate niche and serve it better.
Rudra – thanks for the information!
hey guys i want to develop online job portal website could u give me some clue how to proceed with it,please help any links where in i can find the codings,plz
“I think giving employers what they desire and giving candidates what they desire should be the core focus. Research should be done on the pains in the jobs segment. “—-Rajiv Dingra
As per me this is more important.And i am also planning for a best job portal which will satisfy all the needs.I have developed portal which will handle all the transactions in the HR Consultancy for candidate tracking.And again i have one trade secret which i cant disclose here but i am sure about the revolution it’ll bring….just wait for few months….
And my dear friends if you can help me with the best things i can give in job portal…so please suggest me…and i’ll implement all those things….i propose you all for valuable contribution in REVOLUTION……..technology i’ll be using is ASP.NET with C#/MS SQL Server 2005,AJAX……
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Hi stanley ,
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Now-a-days Travel portal are also running and they offering good job like EtravelsIndia.com They provides all the travel information about india related.
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Dear ashish,
i am also planning to start a job portal for a specfic sector,currently i am preparing the project report. can you share your exprtise with me . ….
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article s time to change the rules!, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
I agree with your part of the article which you say, which site is no.1 Indian job site, both of them are close, but I think recently naukri has climbed a bit high, most resume replies are received from naukri, Also for freshers I see another site Freshershome.com, which has some jobs database as well and some good career resources. jobs4freshers.com is also good but it is limited to Mumbai only I think
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Hi Ashish,
Thank you for giving us lots of information anout the job portals. I am pankaj kumar, i want to introduce you with new job portal i.e Talentty.(http://www.Talentty.com).
As you write we need some changes in recuritment industry. Talentty introduces some changes. Talentty is a new generation job portal. It is newly introduced in the market and soon get 5000 professional and 250 employers.
It has new feachers like specialize Job Board, Job Matching Engine, Talent Board.
I am requesting you to visite Talentty and give your valuable comment, feedback, suggestion to talentty blog.
Thank You,
Pankaj Kumar
good review!! not all portals have to move to social networking for what-so-ever reason like. In-fact in social networking spectrum I don’t see many me-too type portals surviving.If you have a business outside the web and wanna enhance it with social networking or web in general it might make sense otherwise I don’t see much a future for more SN sites.
Ashish,
I happened to see your blog on the job portals. I wish to bring to your attention about our job portal http://www.eUdyog.com. As one of the founders of the portals, we have ensured that we position ourselves different from day 1. In our portal, we do not take any personally identifiable information about the job seeker nor do we take their resumes. It is different. Would appreciate if you and the other readers take some time off to visit our portal and write to us on what they think. This will help us to constantly improve.
Thank you once again for providing me with this opportunity.
Regards,
Narayanan
It is nice blog over Job portals in India, I am in recruitment and what I feel that Naukri.com is simply the best I ever seen as job seeker OR as a recruiter .all other are not nearing naukri.com, though monster is giving good competition to naukri.com,