As employees keep switching jobs as fast as companies are able to fill the vacancies, job portals seem to be enjoying a boom, says Venkatchari Jagannathan.

Chennai: Domestic job portals are witnessing increased business, thanks to the various surveys predicting a boom in jobs across sectors and non-IT companies embracing online recruitment.

Says N Muralidharan, managing director, JobStreet.com India Pvt Ltd, "We are seeing an increase in the recruitment needs of non-IT companies. There is a 70 per cent month-on- month increase in resumes for non IT sector jobs and 56 per cent growth in the number of job postings on the site by the companies." Jobstreet is listed on the Mesdaq market of Bursa Malaysia.

Adds R Guhan, country manager, Jobsdb.com, "Many companies are switching over to e-recruitment in a big way. Nearly 30 per cent of job postings on our site are by manufacturing companies." Another Chennai-based job site, Clickjobs.com claims 45 per cent non-IT job postings.

The overall recruitment market — including the cost of paper advertisements, consultant fees and others — is around Rs1,300 crore. "The online recruitment industry is around Rs150 crore and is growing by at least 50 per cent. The growth rate will remain the same for the next five years," he adds. However, none of the sites are willing to share their revenue figures.

Not long ago, job portals received the bulk of their business from the IT sector. With increasing employee attrition, soon companies in the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, telecom, pharma, banking and financial services, too, began moving on to e-recruitments to widen the base of respondents and simultaneously save on costs. And now even manufacturing companies like Flex Industries, LG Electronics, Goldstar Enterprises, Havell''s, Ashok Leyland and others have been following suit.

It is a natural transition from traditional recruitment to technology-enabled solutions that simplify the recruitment process since employees have been increasingly frequenting job search sites for newer employment avenues. "We currently offer our website users exhaustive job search options as well as through SMSs on mobiles. Combined with the regular job fairs that these portals organize, there emerges an ideal mix of online and offline options," explains Rajeev Gaur, CEO, TimesJobs.com.

According to Gaur, the idea is to provide 24x7 access to jobs for a job seeker and the reduced recruitment cycle for the employers. For employees on the prowl for new opportunities, job portals are an attractive medium to enable employers to locate them, while for companies, these sites enable them to position themselves as preferred employers.

"Entry level and middle management position are some of the popular vacancies filling the portals, says Guhan." This year he expects banking, financial services and insurance sector, retail, airlines and manufacturing to be the largest employers apart from the IT and ITeS sectors.

But switching over to online recruitment is not like surfing the net. Explains Michael M Bala, business head, ClickJobs, "Online recruitment requires dealing with large volumes of applications, choices are many and so it is critical to have necessary tools to identify the right kind of candidates. Also, a better understanding of what the candidate intends to communicate is needed."

For the employers who opt for online recruitment Muralidharan has a word of advice,. "The top management should be committed to this method of recruitment and ensure dedicated resource to use this medium. Similarly, it should devote enough time and energy to design the advertisement for the advertised positions. In order to derive the full benefit companies should put all its positions online and decide to be committed to long term."

With the market dotted with several players, job sites offering value added solutions have an edge over others. For instance JobStreet offers a software, Impact, which helps in streamlining the entire recruitment process. According to Muralidharan, around 35 Indian corporates are using this software installed in the website of the client as an application software provider (ASP).

On its part, TimesJobs offers a solution called Empower, a holistic tool for sourcing candidates as well as managing applications.

Though their core offering is online, the job portals conduct offline promotions like having strategic tie-up with newspapers, conduct and participate in job fairs.

Says Gaur, "We are the pioneers in organising job fairs, branded as Big Leap Job Fairs, enabling direct interaction between job seekers and employers. Another first has been the initiation of virtual job fairs online, which allow employers the facility of quality talent acquisition from the convenience of their offices besides giving job seekers the opportunity to respond to job openings from several companies from the comfort of their homes." The site spends around Rs20 crore on promotional its campaign.

Interestingly, only Naukri.com spends money on television commercials while others advertise online and in the print media.

These sites do not consider recruitment consultants entering this space as a major threat. Remarks Muralidharan, "The portal business is transaction-based where as a consultancy is relationship-based. Both require different skill sets."

On the other hand, it is the prospect of newspaper groups launching job sites that is is a major threat, since online sites eat in to the ad revenues of newspapers. Except for The Times of India group, no other news organisation has launched a job site. Explains Gaur, "This business is essentially a media business, and therefore it is best done by a media company. Reach is a constraint for most players in the business."

The site leverages The Times group''s resources like the print, internet, television, and the radio. Consequently, within just two years of its launch, Timesjobs has emerged as one of the leading jobs portal in the country.

How do corporates measure the effectiveness of job portals?

"A job portal is essentially a medium which helps bring employers and job seekers together. In this respect, the success of any job portal is measured by how effectively it is able to accomplish the task of matchmaking and the satisfaction that it is able to provide its customers," responds Gaur.

The other measures of effectiveness are:

• The number of people recruited through the portal
  
• Comparing the cost of recruitment on the level of positions
  
• The number of resumes in the database and
  
• The number of page views.

The freshness of the resumes is a major advantage that sites have over print publications because of the frequency of daily uploads that is possible.

Gaur claims his portal has a registered a database of 4.2 million job-seekers, with 16,000 new resumes added every day.

On the other hand, JobStreet''s Muralidharan claims a monthly page viewership of 85 million and 1.5 million resumes. "We systematically purge our database to keep the resumes current. Every 90 days we encourage people to update and we also run schemes." JobStreet according to him is a value player rather than a volume player. "Our site is used for recruiting middle and senior middle management cadres and in some cases even the top management."

According to Clickjobs'' Bala, since the site was launched in August 2005, around 750 candidates who applied through his site have been placed at various levels. "We have about one lakh jobseekers, 1,500 employers and 6,000 requirements on our site."

With phenomenal growth potential, foreign portals like Monster.com are coming to India. Predicting a shake-up in the industry Guhan says, "Only serious players will survive the onslaught."

The other interesting possibility is the emergence of regional language job portals. "The regional-isation of job portals is an interesting possibility, which could perhaps start happening soon," says Gaur.

So far, Jobsdb seems to be taking the initiative by launching a Tamil job portal soon.

"Online recruitment is dependent on computer literacy and internet penetration. Today these portals are known amongst those having email accounts. Further, going by the kind of positions that are recruited online now I don''t think there is a need for regional language job portal. However in Malaysia, even drivers are recruited online," says Muralidharan.

Concurring with him Bala says, "It is highly cumbersome for a candidate to post his profile using assisted tools."

Meanwhile, the players are expanding their operations. Says Muralidharan, "In India we are in five cities — Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai. We haven''t gone to second tier cities in south and to few first tier cities in the north. We have plans to open offices in Gujarat, Delhi and in the National Capital Region in couple of month''s. We will also open offices in Coimbatore and parts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh."

Naukri has started a new online venture for the Gulf , Naukri Gulf. The site will assist recruiters and jobseekers in the Middle East region targetting jobs in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and other countries in the region.

Present in all major Indian cities now, even Timesjobs will soon start operations in the Gulf and the Middle Eastern.

On its part, ClickJobs, which is present in Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore will be expanding to Trivandrum, Pune and Kolkata. Incidentally the country''s first ISO 9000 certified site is fine-tuning its features in line with the demands of the market.