New careers on blogs, DTH, mobile

With the job market severely hit during the downturn and the number of jobs dwindling, job portals are discovering newer routes to grow. And if recent initiatives are any indication, the war to capture marketshare in still lukewarm job market is set to intensify.

Market leader naukri.com has rolled out a pilot on twitter.com where it hopes to build groups around job categories across functions like HR, marketing, IT or even Java. Though company COO & Director Hitesh Oberoi says it’s too early to comment on it (Twitter initiative), it’s ready with more initiatives.

One such platform is its job portal firstnaukri.com aimed only at freshers. The idea is to create a product for campus. Says Oberoi: “There was a gap in the market in terms of a platform that connects students and companies. Most of the current portals are used for lateral hiring.”

When Monster India along with ITC e-Choupal launched a job portal targeted at the rural markets in August, it was hoping to get at least 50-odd jobs live in the first couple of weeks. Less than a month into the rollout, the portal—rozgarduniya.com —has more than 1,207 live jobs from 52 companies.

In hindsight, Sanjay Modi, MD, Monster India, underestimated his targets. That’s because with telecom, FMCG, banking, among others, clamouring for a slice of the rural market, rural jobs are the flavour of the season. Monster is targeting 40,000 villages across nine states where e-Choupal has its network. Says Modi: “Monster and ITC have been working on the project for the last 12 months. We implanted the portal on ITC e-Choupal since a community is already built around the platform.”

Before going rural, Monster had set its sight on 5.5 million DTH households across the country when it launched job search called “MonsterJobs Active” on DTH platform in tie-up with Dish TV. The jobrelated data existing on the portal is made available on TV. Through a menu-enabled platform, seekers can view jobs on their television screens and can apply for jobs on the portal. Modi claims 1,000-1,200 jobs go live every day on the platform, which was launched in July 2009. Next on his agenda is a mobile offering on a new technology platform.

By their own admission, job portals have not seen any surge in the number of jobseekers reaching out to them in the slowdown. Contrast this with the 150-200 per cent increase that placement firms have recorded in the last one year with jobseekers preferring targeted hiring opportunities instead of relying on job portals. According to Hastha Krishnan, CEO, Ma Foi Global Search Services, recruitment and placement firms are facing a problem of plenty at a time when volume hiring is not happening. Little surprise then, portals are wooing with an array of new platforms.