On the job, and clicking

Bharat Kumar

THESE are interesting times for an e-recruitment specialist -- job portal on the Web, in other words. For a company like Jobstreet.com, times such as these can be testing or rewarding. Given that it started during the Asian economic crisis, it's worthwhile revisiting the company to see its take on the scenario now.

Its founder, who was running Malaysia Online.com (MOL), noticed that when everything was down, jobs were still in demand and applications were flying forth. Thus came into existence Jobstreet.com in 1995.

eWorld met N. Muralidharan, Managing Director for Indian Operations and Vice-President at Jobstreet.com India. Excerpts from the chat:

You started off during a recession. Do the same fundamentals for business hold now in this gloomy scenario?

They certainly do now.

But people are cutting jobs now. Are some hiring too, using e-recruitment agencies? In the last six months, what have been the total number of titles advertised in your site? (For the readers' benefit: if a company needs four vice-presidents' posts to be filled, the title is one -- vice-president -- while the jobs are counted as four on the site.)

The number of titles and jobs has come down. Consolidation is happening. In this kind of a situation, companies are looking at candidates with magnifying glasses, asking what jobs can be collapsed, etc. They are looking at single candidates with multiple skills. Specific niche skills used to be in big demand -- such as Y2K, Internet initiatives, Java, e-consulting -- and the like. Now that's not happening. Even among other sectors, it's been a tough roll. Manufacturing is going through a slump.

As for us, if we saw 12,000 to 13,000 jobs per day in four countries where we have presence, today we see anywhere between 7,000 and 8,000 jobs a day. That's the reflection.

Has the number of clients dropped?

The mixture has changed. IT used to be low-hanging fruit, not so anymore. However, a good chunk still tilts towards IT. If we had 65 per cent of business from IT earlier, now it is about 40 per cent. What we notice happening along with the increased focus on other areas, is that certain organisations take longer to adopt -- the IT industry had adopted the e-recruitment concept better. In other segments, unless a company is among the top ten in a country or top three within a segment, the mindset is different and it takes longer to adopt. In addition, delayed decision-making makes it long enough.

What other segments have come up afresh? We noticed Insurance as a focus on your site. That should be recent.

Insurance is very recent. Before that, banking, financial services, manufacturing and consumer durables came up in a big way. LG, Electrolux, GE Appliances,... are all customers.

In other words, you are still growing, but not as fast as you would like to.

Yes. Upto April, we grew at a scorching pace. After April, we felt like we had hit a speedbreaker. Then, in June, we hit a wall. And then, we went onto look for new areas and innovate our offerings. New avenues such as insurance, consumer durables, finance sector -- we started looking at these about that time. Then we decided that we must give innovative solutions.

Whichever segment we addressed, where decision-making was slow, or wherever VRS happening, we found that intake of fresh blood is on, in some way. We hear of campus recruits being refused offers that had been made to them, deferred joining dates, and the like. Clearly, volumes have been affected but it's still happening. This is important for them, if they have to have new skills incorporated into the system every year or have similar criteria. So we came out with a campus product used now by ICICI. Earlier if they spent three days, now they spend a day for the whole process.

Your second round funding yielded $2 million earlier this year. What now?

We are positively conservative. We tell ourselves, ``Behave as if you didn't get this round of fund.'' We are fortunate that the Philippines and Malaysian arms are cash-positive already. That gives you a tremendous amount of operational convenience. India and Singapore will break even. Originally we wanted the Indian operations to reach that target by December this year. There is some delay but we cannot guess accurately when that would happen. But we are not overly bothered, because the run rate is good.

Now, aggressive expansion plans will take a back seat. For instance, we wanted to establish a presence in the US. Since we felt the tremors of a slowdown in the January-February-March quarter of this year, we decided not to do anything. We saw people holding back investments, preferring outsourcing. Since there was little demand for people going from here to there, we decided that the US was a no-no for now.

Now, more people are applying for less jobs. Doesn't that make a job site look less efficient?

No. We measure our success by Fill Rates. This is equal to the number of jobs filled divided by the number of jobs advertised on our site. So, it is dependent on the number of jobs filled and not the number of candidates' resumes in our database.

We have recently seen in media reports that fill rates for your company are 23 per cent in Malaysia and in single digits for the Indian market. Is this because you are new here or because the market is not ready for e-recruitment?

Fill rate is an internal term in our company. If X number of companies come on board every month, some percentage should meet requirements. Only then will they come back for the next requirement. We believe that 60 to 70 per cent of our business should be from repeat customers. The rest should be new, year-on-year. Now, if we want repeat business, we have to give something to him. To reach our targets, we have this day zero, day 7, day 14, day 21 and day 28 concept. If someone has to fill a post, he/she has to fill it within 28 days -- else, there is little chance that it will be filled.

Once a job is posted for, we check response on day seven. If it is not good then, it may not improve after that. So, our customer care team goes back to the client, sees what more can be done, like tweak the advertisement, change the specifications, go to our database and see if we can mine some data, send alerts to more people with a different background. By day 21, they should be able to shortlist candidates.

Fill rates may not increase, because companies may not have broadcast their requirements correctly, or we may not have an adequate database to fulfill their requirements, or because people are cautious about moving, or companies are not processing efficiently. Sometimes, the fact that companies are not well known enough can be damaging. We then broadcast messages so as to build brand for the company.

Feedback can be sent to bharatk@thehindu.co.in

Picture: Mr N. Muralidharan