The global recession of 2008-09 has brought in a major shift in the way companies are assessing their human capital needs. Monster India Managing Director Sanjay Modi says employers today want to make every hire count by finding the right skills for every job. They are not willing to hire and invest in people who are, say, 60 per cent there. Relevance has thus become a key parameter in evaluating hiring. Modi speaks to Amit Ranjan Rai on how jobs portal Monster India helps both companies and job seekers make the right choice.
The online jobs space is a crowded one today. What differentiates Monster from others?
Monster is a pioneer in its category the world over. When the company was founded in 1994, the term Monster was coined to connote bigness. It was quite aware of the size and scale it would gain as it rolls out globally. Monster entered India in 2001 and its philosophy has been to behave like a local company. In 2004, it acquired one of India’s leading job portals, JobsAhead, which catapulted it to the leadership position. Then, 2005 was a turning point as Monster launched its local technology platform based on industry patterns and psychographics of job seekers. Before that it was running on Monster’s global platform. This positioned us strongly as a local leader with a global footprint.
Our superiority lies in our product and technology. That’s our USP. The model with which we started in 1994 is strong and hasn’t changed. In fact, the players that came after us have adopted the same model. In almost all the markets our competitors are following us. Second, what’s unique to us is the kind of profiles we attract. You will find a lot of e-recruitment players with profiles of job seekers with zero to two years of experience — that’s easy as that segment of job seekers applies to many sites. In this industry, the premiumness of a site depends on how many senior-level profiles it attracts. Because of our brand strength, a professional of 15 years of experience doesn’t hesitate to apply with us. Senior-level professionals don’t put their profiles on multiple websites. They usually put it on one and like it to be confidential because India is a big head-hunting market.
About 25 to 28 per cent of our database is talking to people with over 10 years of experience. That’s not the case with any of our competitors.
The ad campaign you launched in July this year talks about a new positioning....
Towards the latter half of the global recession of 2008-09, we saw a shift happening both from a hiring and job-seeking perspective. One factor that came up in a big way was relevance. The hundreds of employers we were in touch with said that the right skills matching the right jobs was critical. It was no more the case where the employer was ready to hire a person who was 60 per cent there and for the rest he was willing to invest.
On the other hand, the insight from the job-seeker community was that many were doing jobs not to their liking. One may have a flair for brand management, but he was doing a sales job. Or a great salesperson may be doing an accounts job.
So relevance became important for both employers and job seekers. It became a focus area for us and the creative connector to our new campaign. The creatives centre on the idea: What’s the point of choices if they don’t work for you, and how Monster can help find the right job and the right candidate. What’s also interesting is that if you notice job sites globally, you’ll see they talk only to the job seeker. I’ve never seen them talking to the employer. With this campaign we made a shift where we talk both to the job seeker as well as the employer who are our customers. A right job for you will mean the right candidate for the person who is hiring you. That’s a new strong positioning in the marketplace. How is the company doing in India?
It is doing extremely well. We have been growing since the time we launched. All our businesses, expansion, funding and so on are managed by the India operations. There is no support that we seek from the US office to manage our operations here locally. We have been managing healthy growth rates. In the initial years, it was 60 to 70 per cent year on year, and for the last three years, we have grown at about 40 per cent, 2009 being the exception when we faced a 20 per cent drop. But in 2010, we see us moving back to the previous levels — we expect 30 to 35 per cent growth.
You talk about relevance emerging as an important factor for employers. What are you doing to deliver more relevant results?
When we decided that we’ll make relevance our positioning, the first thing that went through our mind was how we deliver on the promise. There is a lot of ground work we did in the past one-and-a-half years. A lot of changes have been made to the website to facilitate relevant results to both job seekers and employers. For instance, the Boolean logic on which the search tool functions has been made sharper — it intelligently takes into account new factors such as relevant experience and functions in making a search. Today, Monster has about 2 million résumés in its database, and it is growing by 15,000 résumés a day. If it has to find out that one pin from the haystack, unless the engine is robust to do that, my promise will fail. So we built such logics into the search methodology.
Prior to that, which works for both seekers and employers, we brought in a three-tier job posting system. For instance, earlier candidates were applying to jobs which they were not qualified for. This meant the employers were getting a lot of unwanted profiles. So we brought in filters at the job-posting levels, so that when one starts applying, a pop-up comes which tells one this job is asking for four to six years of experience, and one is not qualified for it. So we are not barring the seeker, but giving a very subtle message to improve the quality. This we introduced in the beginning of this year.
On the product side, we have launched a new seeker site. With the help of some broad changes, within two clicks the seeker can reach the destination he wants. The browsing is now very flexible — for instance, you can look for jobs by location, experience, function and other such filters. We also connected the employer and the prospective employee closely. For instance, if an employer writes an email to the job seeker saying that he has shortlisted him, the email communication will become visible on the job seeker’s My Monster page. Second, we have made our technology more intelligent and intuitive — when the job seeker logs in as a registered user, it will map his profile, pick up the relevant jobs and put it on the home page. This is something that has been done for the first time with the intent to increase relevance. Besides, if you are logged in to your Monster home page, but are surfing other websites at the same time,
Monster will pick up the jobs relevant and post it on your page while you’re are not looking at it.
What is your revenue model and what are the key areas that drive your revenue?
Employers pay us, and the model is subscription-based, which means you can pay or buy job postings or listings that you see on the site, you can gain access to our database and can take up a number of branding opportunities for your company on our site. On the higher end, we also manage career sections of corporations, which means if an organisation has a website with a career section, it can ask us to implant our technology and run that section for it.
What is unique about Monster is that it can provide an end-to-end solution to any organisation. From the lowest denominator, say, a job posting for Ludhiana, to the other extreme whereby it can offer a solution to recruit people globally, say, in the US, UK, France, Japan and so on. There are many corporations that are global in nature and are operating in fifty- or hundred-plus countries, they come to Monster and ask how can it help them at a global level. So we are a one-stop shop for organisations of all types and sizes.
What is your Rozgar Duniya initiative with ITC all about?
In the Indian market, most of the job sites are big city- or metro-centric. There has been nothing connecting the rural market to the main employment field, and that is where we launched the Rozgar Duniya initiative which is typically a rural jobs website in collaboration with ITC. ITC is a pioneer in rural market initiatives and it has been looking at ways to come close to the rural family unit. Research showed that a big concern for rural families was jobs for the ones who were growing up. Many were not looking at going back to the farm but job opportunities elsewhere.
Since 2007-08, Monster had also been looking at models that can possibly work in the rural market. That is where the two organisations came together. ITC liked Monster’s strength in what we do, and we liked their knowledge of the rural market. We thus decided to put up a job portal on ITC’s e-choupal kiosks. The way this works is, you have a sanchalk appointed by ITC who is like a village head; the villagers go up to his office or residence where the kiosk is installed and can register on Rozgar Duniya.
A duplication of Monster India site on ITC’s e-choupal would not have worked. What we found was there were people who haven’t finished the fourth standard in school, while there were also graduates and postgraduates. So with that kind of width, we went again to the drawing board to structure a completely new site which can talk to the villagers in their language but still captures the details which an employer would be interested in. There was a lot of ground work that Monster did from 2007 to 2009; we spent time in going to various industry verticals, from the top 10 to the bottom 10 to understand if the rural market attracts them. The one answer that was common across all was, yes. As we know, during the slowdown most of the organisations were looking to expand into the rural market.
The challenge that they gave us was, there is no formal hiring mechanism or process available. They have to rely on middlemen and touts; they were not sure if there was exploitation happening on the other side, which they don’t want to get associated with. Two, they were not sure whether they were being given a window to the entire talent pool available. So we took those leads and we went to the villagers, and asked what is it that they are looking at from an employer. They said it would be better if the local language is used on the site at kiosks — so we now run the portal in both English and Hindi.
They also said not to make the registration to the jobs site too complicated. Initially, we had created a three-page profile format, but now we have brought it down to one.
ITC has e-choupals in nine states covering some 40,000 villages. In August 2009, we did a pilot of Rozgar Duniya in two villages of Western UP. We posted jobs, got applications from the seekers, and between August and December 2009, 140 offer letters were given out by the employers. So from a model perspective we knew it was working fine. From January 2010 onwards, we took the project to four states covering 10,000 villages. This is a pilot which is going on now. Today, we have about 11,000 registered users on Rozgar Duniya. The next plan is to take it across nine states and 40,000 villages in the next three to four months.
You have also taken the television route to be effective in Tier 2 and 3 cities?
In the US, we have a tie-up with Comcast, one of the largest television service providers; so we had the technology to marry television and jobs together. My idea was why can’t we bring this to India. At that time, there were three or four key players in the television arena, among them Dish TV had the largest market share, controlling 45 to 50 per cent of the market. But what stood unique was its high penetration in Tier 2 to Tier 3 markets. So we went to Dish TV with our offering, and it made a lot of sense to it because it had just introduced its interactive section. We worked on streamlining the processes for about six months, and today the live feed from Monster is automatically pushed to the Dish TV system so that at any point of time you are looking for a job, you get the most updated results. With your remote you can browse by industry or function and look at the job description. If you are a registered user, you can apply through SMS.
