'India is still a resume market'

Michael P Durney

Dice Inc., American online recruiter, tied up with CyberMedia India to launch a job board focused on technology last week. Michael P Durney, senior vice president, finance, CFO and treasurer of Dice Inc, was here.

He spoke to Business Standard on the recruitment scene globally and how it has evolved.

Have recruitment needs of companies changed over the years?

The Indian market has become more international. A big change in the West is having a larger tech base.

Two years ago, the online business was based on volume "� post jobs out there and ask for resumes, which was great.

In this market, people realise how bad that is. India is still a resume market. In the US, what's changed is that recruiters have become more focused on what they are trying to find.

The online recruitment space is cluttered. How do ensure that you are seen?

We do two things to compete against the horizontal job boards. One is the technology which is very similar to the horizontals. But the search and matching capabilities within technologies is very specifically geared towards tech skills.

The horizontal boards have very good search technology, but it's geared to all jobs and the requirements are generic.

If you use our search technology and if you are looking for somebody with three different tech disciplines over two years each, you can search that on our index. You can't do that on horizontal job boards. And technology is key to that process.

The average tech person doesn't know what Dice is. Our target audience is all tech professionals, mostly mid to upper level. Eighty per cent of the searchable profiles on Dice have five years of experience, and about 50 per cent have 10 years of experience.

So compared to many of the horizontals in India, Dice in the US has many more higher level tech professionals.

Is the business big enough?

We compete with Monster, Hotjobs, Jobsahead and others, but not necessarily against them. Our customers have broad needs. And technology recruiters have only technology needs. So we tell them that you can buy Monster, Hotjobs and others as they provide a lot of value across a broad range. We say, if you want hardcore tech professionals, you be with us and we take a piece of their recruiting budget.

The online recruitment market is $1.5 bn. In the US, tech employment is somewhere between 4 per cent and 7 per cent. Online recruiting dollars spent on technology recruiting is 10 per cent. So the market in which we operate is more than $200 mn. That's big.