Every year, 50 million youngsters enter the job market in India. Till about a year ago, apart from traditional print ads and recruiting agencies, their only other option of seeking jobs was Naukri.com, started way back in April 1997. But things have changed radically with the dotcom boom in the last year.
Today, if you are unemployed, you'll be spoilt for choice. Not just for your line of work, but where to look for a job. A quick look-up on a search engine will throw up around 173 sites offering jobs. Apart from Naukri, now there's Jobsahead.com, Jobstreet.com, Alltimejobs.com, Prizedjobs.com, Careerenrich.com, Careerindia.com, its namesake with an `s', Careersindia.com, Netpilgrim.com, and a mindboggling number of others.
Now, the buzz is that the worldwide leader in Internet recruiting, Monster.com, is coming to town, possibly by June. Sources say it is already here and is laying the groundwork for its Indian initiative.
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Naturally, it's become a jungle out there with each site working hard to stay fit and survive. The trend is already evident in the large-scale advertising and promos offering anything from T-shirts to luxury cars planned by most contenders. Till last week, Naukri.com, the first mover in the online job-boards market in India with a distinct lead in the race, didn't spend a penny on advertising. This week, it's all over the main papers with huge print ads.
There's fierce undercutting going on as well. So while Naukri charges companies from Rs 350 to Rs 9,000 for its services and job-seekers Rs 500 to Rs 2,000, some of the fresh entrants like alltimejobs.com, are going all out to woo more registrations by charging nothing to post your resumes or your vacancy ads.
Does Naukri feel threatened? No, says Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of Info Edge India Pvt Ltd, Naukri's holding company "We have a terrific brand equity, have been around for a long time and are bookmarked on more Indian PCs than anyone else. And we're already making profits, perhaps the only dotcom in India to do so." However, he refuses to disclose figures.
His claims may be true, considering the fact that Naukri had not spent a penny on advertising before. And compared to other dotcoms who start scouting around for venture capitalists very soon, Naukri has only now got VC funding _ ICICI Ventures has invested $two million for a 10 per cent stake.
So why this rush for job sites? Essentially, the potential seems huge. There are no specific figures for India, but according to Forrester Research, the global online recruitment market in 1999 was approximately $265 million and is expected to grow to $1.7 billion by 2003. Moreover, Internet advertising represented less than three per cent of total classified spending in 1999. Expectations are that Internet recruiting spending should jump to 20 per cent of the total spending by 2003.
There's definitely a lot of action in the market with anybody and everybody entering the fray. According to a Goldman Sachs report on Internet Recruiting, at the beginning of 1999, there were an estimated 2.5 million resumes online and approximately 28,500 job boards worldwide. Since then, traffic has increased substantially _ and India is yet only catching up.
But like all things dotcom, success initially depends on venture capital and attracting venture capital depends on how good your site is. A preliminary scan suggests that getting funding will be heavy-going for some sites.
For instance, a look at Careersindia's homepage will inspire you to find another site instantly. Jobstreet covers jobs all over Asia. Jobsahead has the largest online content library on careers. Careerenrich is a serious site with good content and a section on women, but the jobs on offer are not all that enticing. Netpilgrim has a confused focus and is more like a horizontal portal with e-greetings, cricket, news, et al.
Acknowlegding this, Deepti Chawla of alltimejobs says, "Some sites are set up for the sole purpose of selling them off at a later date, and some are here to stay in the long run. We are in the latter category and are not looking at VC funding till we are established enough."
VC funding in the initial stages is not very enjoyable for most promoters as there are clauses put in to the agreement, whereby a VC can practically dictate terms. Yet, Chawla says that they could be getting funding in one to three months.
Of course, everybody is going to town claiming millions of pageviews per month in millions, but as the Nasdaq crash in Internet stocks last month proved, eyeballs are simply not enough. You must have a business model and be able to generate revenues. As Bikhchandani puts it, "Make losses, that doesn't matter yet, but you must have a revenue stream, at least."
Revenue from corporates, advertising and value-added services is what would drive these sites. Alltimejobs, for instance, intends to keep its basic services such as posting a resume or vacancy free, but will start charging for its value-added services such as job alerts after about six months.
But in this crowding market, what will be the vital thing for survival.
Puneet Dalmia, CEO of Jobsahead.com, says "There are two critical things _ one is the management team's strength and strategy and the other is how well you service your customers, as in, are the corporates actually getting quality people through you or not. There is evidence that as the market matures, fulfilment becomes more important than mere numbers." (Jobs ahead.com, incidentally, is in talks with investors for a second round of funding. In the first round, Chrysalis invested Rs 20 crore for an undisclosed stake.)
For instance, there's also a tendency among some jobsites to just cut and paste job vacancies from print ads so as to inflate the number of vacancies that they list. Jobsahead and Naukri list only those job openings that are authorised by companies. So resumes forwarded by these get higher priority.
This is what will make the ultimate difference, whether these sites actually get jobs effected for prospective employers and employees.
Moreover, the market can be fragmented by customer segments and industries _ broadbased sites and industry-specific jobsites. Jobsites like Cioljobs.com, and Itspace.com's Itjobs, both focused on jobs in the information technology sector, fall in the latter category where there is still more action expected. There's space for 10-15 sites to live happily off the big e-recruiting pie, industry insiders believe.
Not surprisingly, alliances are already taking place between general portals and career portals. Careerindia.com has tied up with Indiainfo.com, Netpilgrim.com's with Rediff.com, Prizedjobs with Satyam... so if you go to Indiainfo, and look for jobs, you will access Careerindia's job listings and so on.
This is a trend that is expected to grow sharply. With VCs now turning a mite dotcom shy, it doesn't take a management guru to predict that a shakeout is imminent here too, though Dalmia says this won't happen before six to 12 months. "The jobsites market is quite nascent. Once the shakeout happens, only then will the players work towards consolidation," he says. That should separate the boys from the men and the jobspams from the monsters.