Contemporary Research in E-Marketing_4 docx

These observations helped Bikhchandani figure out that there is a huge mented database of jobs with different placement consultants and jobs are ahigh-interest category.. Bikhchandani cl

These observations helped Bikhchandani figure out that there is a huge mented database of jobs with different placement consultants and jobs are ahigh-interest category If someone could consolidate the database of live jobsand put it in one place and continuously update it, that would be a very powerful

frag-product and money could be made out of this Bikhchandani realized this by the

end of 1989 and early 1990 He quit his job in October 1990 and along with apartner started the company Info Edge (India) Private Limited This companywas initially into databases, trademark searching services, report writing, and so

on But the jobs database idea remained dormant in his mind

Why the Name Naukri.com?

While there are many factors that contributed to making Naukri.com a successstory, part of the credit goes to its unique nomenclature The Naukri.com teamhad intentions of giving the Web site an English name A number of names werethought of, such as, jobsindia, indiajobs, employindia, indiaemploy, careerindia,careersindia, indiacareers, employmentIndia, and recruitmentindia To theirdisappointment, however, all these names were already registered Therefore,

a compromise had to be made and a decision was made to name the Web siteNaukri Opponents of this name said that this name was down market and had

the connotation of “servitude” (naukar) attached to it But the name was

retained because of its memorability and uniqueness Interestingly, SanjeevBikhchandani considers the brand name to be an asset for his company.Bikhchandani says, “It’s turned out to be a great asset for us At that time, Ithought it would be a handicap.” Moreover, he did not believe that the Hindi namewould be a handicap in the southern part of India for the simple reason that Hindimovies are released in south India and they are avidly watched there

Why Naukri.com was not Affected by the Dot-Com

Meltdown

The parent company of Naukri.com is 14 years old It launched Naukri.com inMarch 1997 and operated for 3 years without venture capital Since venturecapital funding was not taken upfront, the company had to make money in order

to survive Dot-coms themselves are just about 7 years old and were notfashionable at the time when Naukri.com was launched Therefore, by the timedot-coms became popular, Naukri.com was already profitable and withoutventure capital funding too Venture capital funding was taken merely to scale

up an existing profitable model

Bikhchandani claims the dot-com bust in fact helped Naukri.com Whencompetitors came to India, they had a high cost model and did not know how tomake money because of their unfamiliarity with the market Naukri.com, on theother hand, was already making money Naukri.com did not spend its money onadvertising It just put it in a bank, put feet on the street, hired salespeople, builtclient relationships, and opened new offices When the meltdown actuallyhappened, competitors could not get a second round of funding whereasNaukri.com did not need a second round of funding This helped Naukri.com inbeating competition.

During the meltdown, foreign competitors such as monster, jobstreet, and jobsdb,came to India with the promise of sending Indian technical manpower abroad.The meltdown resulted in a reduced demand for Indian technical manpower Theforeign portals then lost interest in the Indian market There was additionalpressure on them in the United States Bikhchandani says, “We used the last 4years of meltdown very, very profitably in consolidating our business, building ourbrand, moving in a planned manner, not spending our money foolishly, and reallystrengthening our position So the meltdown actually helped us because it reallykilled our competition.”

Organizational Structure

The organization chart of Naukri.com is presented in Figure 2

Figure 2 Organization chart of Naukri.com

Regional Manager (North)

Heads of various departments (IT, Marketing, Operations, HR)

Area Managers

Regional Manager (South) Manager (West) Regional

Area Managers Area Managers

Team Members (Senior Executives)

Team Members (Senior Executives)

Team Members (Senior Executives)

Chief Executive Officer

Human Resource Management at Naukri.com

The profiles of various management personnel at Naukri.com is presented inAppendix 1 It is clear from the management profiles that Naukri.com has a fairlysophisticated pool of talent in its management The work environment atNaukri.com is also very open and friendly According to the HR manager,problems are resolved by discussions Even if it is an interdepartmental issue,appointments are not required for discussions with the personnel of the otherdepartment For instance, if the marketing team was working on productdevelopment, it would need to work in close coordination with technologybecause technology is ultimately going to deploy the product over the net If themarketing people have any queries, then they can straight away walk up to thetechnology people and get the issue resolved

People at Naukri.com are given opportunities to learn even at the cost of makingmistakes In the words of the HR manager, “People here get a lot of opportunity

to learn by making mistakes, I would say Because a lot of responsibility is givenand space is given, that you try out things and try to learn on your own.” Themanagement at Naukri.com also encourages idea generation When a newmember joins a team, he/she is only assigned a task How to accomplish the task

is his/her prerogative This prompts the new team member to formulate newideas to do the assigned task in the best possible way Since organizational issuesare recognized as one of the major challenge areas that Naukri.com is facing,during recruitment, attention is paid to ensure that the selected candidate has theright kind of attitude that would help him/her fit into the system Says the HRmanager, “If the attitude is right, people will always learn the skills of doing thetask.” The regional offices themselves hire employees from campus recruitmentfor the regional offices, while the head office helps the regional offices whenlateral recruitment is to be done This assistance is provided to them in terms ofshort-listing the candidates and conducting telephone interviews The regionaloffices themselves proceed with the final interview and selection process

Product/Service Offerings

of Naukri.com

The products offered by Naukri.com are aimed at two broad groups ofcustomers: (1) recruiters and (2) job seekers The products for each group areexplained below

Products for Recruiters

Naukri.com offers a range of services to recruiters A brief description of eachproduct/service follows:

a Best Places to Work: An exclusive section for top companies, this is the

first section that appears on the Naukri.com home page Naukri.comdevelops a career micro-site for the customer company with a link from thehome page This ensures maximum branding and visibility to a company’srecruitment requirements This package provides the Web-enabled Re-sponse Management Software, and e-Apps, free of charge

b Job Gallery: A listing in this section makes the client company directly

accessible from the Naukri.com home page Vacancy listings may becustomized like the vacancies in a newspaper Client company is seen withother quality organizations and vacancies are highlighted

c Hot Vacancies: This is the premium job listing service provided by

Naukri.com to its clients This gives the client companies’ vacanciesgreater visibility in a less cluttered space and they get listed with otherquality jobs Their listing gets covered in the Classifieds section, where freeJob Alerts are done for the client companies’ vacancies and a logo isincluded on listings

d Classifieds: Designed to be brief and to the point, the format ensures easy

access of information Vacancies are listed in specific and relevantcategories, thereby ensuring a higher degree of relevant response

e Résumé Database Access: RESDEX, for short, this product makes the

client company’s recruitment exercise simple, targeted, and focused as an

“in your hands” solution The client may search profiles that are specific tothe client’s requirements and access fresh and active job seekers anytimefrom anywhere RESDEX contains the highest quality résumés available inIndia today

f Electronic Application: This product is also referred to as Apps The

e-Apps Response Management System reduces time spent on managingapplications by 80% CVs are collected in a database format, which can beused to filter out relevant candidates from a large pool in a matter ofminutes

The first four services are job-posting services The point to note here is that all

of the above services/products offered by Naukri.com to employers are paidproducts/services

Products for Job Seekers

Naukri.com offers a range of services to job seekers A brief description of eachproduct/service follows

a Résumé Flash: Naukri.com has a database of 1,000 leading placement

consultants in India For the requisite fee, Naukri.com sends the jobseeker’s résumé to 800 or 1,000 placement consultants The choice of thenumber of consultants to whom the job seeker wants to have his/her résumésent is entirely his/hers

b Résumé Development: Naukri.com’s experts help the job seeker to

develop a powerful and effective résumé This service is also rendered for

a fee

c Job Mail: All the jobs posted on the site are first matched with a job

seeker’s profile and if there is a fit, the job listing is e-mailed to theprospective employee This service may be subscribed to for a 3- or 6-month period

d Job Alert: All the vacancies that Naukri.com receives are mailed to the job

seeker This is a free service

e Résumé Display: In the Paid Résumé Display option, the job seeker’s CV

is visible to all recruiters/HR Managers/Placement Consultants who visitNaukri.com looking for candidates free of charge to them This service may

be subscribed to for a period from 6 months to 1 year

f Résumé Manager: This is a free service in which the job seeker’s CV is

visible only to Naukri.com’s clients who have purchased the RESDEXproduct from Naukri.com

In addition to the above products/services, Naukri.com also offers certainservices such as short-listing candidates and organizing walk-in interviewswhich no other medium does This makes Naukri.com an end-to-end recruitmentsolutions provider

Technology Involved

Because the services offered by Naukri.com are deployed over the Internet, itrequires a very sound technological backup The organization has a 20-strongteam of technology persons, out of which 16 are on the software developmentside This team is entrusted with the responsibility of continuously improving andupgrading existing products and adding new products

Naukri.com has 10 servers in a server farm in the United States The technologyteam in India manages those servers The Web site is served from the servers

in the United States The head office has about 250–300 personal computers,which are used for daily operations The operating system used is Linux, the Webservers used are Apache, the RDBMS software used is MySQL, and theprogramming language employed is PHP According to Sanjeev Bikhchandani,not much data mining is done at Naukri.com

Product and Service Pricing Strategy

The basic strategy of Naukri.com is to be present at every price point in themarket—right from Rs 500 to Rs 9 lacs Presence at all the price points enablesNaukri.com to service low-budget customers, and at the same time, have high-end customers The low-priced services are there to basically enable penetra-tion To quote Sanjeev Bikhchandani, “Essentially our old strategy is penetra-tion—to make the medium popular.” There is also grading in the price chargedwithin a product For example, for one of the products, RESDEX, the price canrange anywhere between Rs 15,000 and Rs 1.5 lacs, depending on how manylogins the customer wants, and whether the customer wants it for 1 month, 3months, or 1 year Similarly, there are a number of other pricing options available

Consumer Segments

The key segments in a B2B sense that Naukri.com serves are recruitmentconsultants and corporates Within the placement consultant segment, it wasfound that consultants catering to different industries are different from eachother in terms of their recruitment solution requirements For instance, place-ment consultants serving the IT sector would be quite different from the otherplacement consultants Within the corporate segment, the segmentation is by theverticals, that is, by the industry type Segmentation is also done according to thesize of the companies In some cases, segmentation is also done geographically.Naukri.com serves all these segments and is a leader in all the segments.Naukri.com has been able to achieve a position of leadership in all thesesegments primarily because of the fact that it was the first mover in the onlinerecruitment market “I think one of the best-kept secrets of most market leaders

is being the first mover The fact that we moved three years before anybody elsereally helped us because we understood the customer, we understood therecruiter, we understood the medium, we understood the technology that has towork in order to make money,” informs Sanjeev Bikhchandani Also, because

Naukri.com’s knowledge of the Indian customer went a long way in contributing

to the overwhelming success of Naukri.com, Bikhchandani believes that foreigncompanies had to adapt their pricing strategy and their business model and therethey floundered

Competition

Naukri.com’s two closest competitors are Jobstreet.com and JobsAhead.com inthe Indian market However, some big multinational competitors, such asMonster.com, have also set up their Indian operations, namely, Monsterindia.com.The screens shots of the Web sites of various competitors are provided inAppendix 2 The details of these Web sites are presented in the following

a Online Job Posting

• Employers can post jobs at their India site

• E-mail notification to suitable candidates through automated job alerts

• Browsing candidates are able to apply online immediately to posted jobadvertisements

• SiVA (JobStreet’s online recruitment management system) RésuméManagement Application to zero-in on the right candidate

• Access to candidate database

• Integrate all candidate data in SiVA to the company’s HR system

JobsAhead.com

JobsAhead has a team of over 125 personnel spread across eight metropolitancities in India It has the unique distinction of powering the job section of India’slargest horizontal portals such as Yahoo! Recently, in May 2004, U.S.-basedglobal leader in online jobs, Monster Worldwide Inc., announced that it hasacquired JobsAhead.com for consideration of Rs 40 crores.5 The Web sitereceives around 5.5 million unique visitors every month and has 2.7 millionrésumés posted on it It has close to 5,000 corporates as its clients

The deal involved acquisition of a company named Webneuron Services, whichruns JobsAhead.com JobsAhead.com was among early entrants in India’s e-recruitment space, where it competes primarily with Naukri.com “India is animportant and strategic market with vast pool of skilled manpower We set eyes

on India as it has one of fastest growing recruitment markets,” says StuartMcKelvey, Monster Worldwide Group president (Asia-Pacific) The originalpromoters of JobsAhead.com, which include Chairman Puneet Dalmia and ViceChairman Alok Mittal, will continue to play their respective roles in the newentity They will benefit monetarily from acquisition besides venture capitalistChrysCapital, which invested around Rs 25 crore in the company

Prior to the merger with Monster, JobsAhead.com offered the followingproducts/services to job seekers:

a Right Résumé: Résumé writing service

b Résumé Blaster: Sends résumés of job seekers to placement consultants

all over the country and to the Middle East (for an extra fee)

c Résumé Highlighter: Highlights the posted résumé of job seeker so that it

may easily catch the attention of the recruiter/placement consultant

d Placement Directory: Complete directory of top placement consultants

across India and abroad

e Career Booster: A package providing all the services listed above

For employers, JobsAhead offers the following products/services:

a Database Access: Paid access to the database of job seekers.

b Job Listings: Employers can advertise their jobs on JobsAhead and let their

jobs viewed by over one million job seekers

c Stingers: Employers’ jobs can be directly delivered into job seekers’ mail

boxes or the job seeker can be called for a walk-in interview

This online job company has also been the only player globally to developrole-based matching techniques (MarksMan), which in conjunction with text-based résumé search (TextStar), has significantly improved customerexperience MarksMan allows corporates to search for candidates by theircurrent job role or designation It defines the job requirement in a singlephrase thereby reducing the cumbersome filling of search forms A singleclick search, MarksMan classifies the recruitment market into 23categories and 600 roles that users can easily understand Users canfurther refine their search based on industry, experience, location, and keyskills TextStar works for the employers’ company by allowing the user toperform a search on all contents of a candidate’s résumé This tool is similar toGoogle in its functionality JobsAhead claims that the use of this tool makes anyrecruitment effort “100% more accurate.”

Monsterindia.com

Monsterindia.com is a flagship brand of Monster Worldwide (NASDAQ:MNST), which is a leading online global careers network and hiring managementresource It was founded in 1994 by Chief Monster, Jeff Taylor, and at present,has sites in 20 countries around the world

As part of its India strategy, Monster Worldwide Inc, the parent of job siteMonster.com, has bought Indian Web site JobsAhead.com as a part of a globalacquisition drive to boost revenues.6 The deal, worth about Rs 400 million ($9.6million), is Monster’s fourth acquisition in less than 3 months and is the first

buyout in India, which is Asia’s third-largest economy and home to boomingsoftware and telecom industries JobsAhead.com, which focuses on IT and BPOrecruitment, will now be fully owned by Monster India Monster Asia Presidentand Managing Director Arun Tadanki said that the combined entity will haveclose to 3,500 clients from across the industry and companies of various sizes.

“The new entity will also have data base of 25 lacs job applications andunduplicated traffic of 55 lacs job seekers, which is twice as large as our nearestcompetitor,” with an obvious reference to Naukri.com

It offers products/services to three consumer segments: (1) job seekers, (2)employers, and (3) movers Job seekers can search for jobs, build and post theirrésumés, and access a number of pages of career information and advice It alsooffers regular e-recruitment facilities, such as résumé registration and e-mailalerts Job seekers can also use the Monster site as a networking platform Theproducts for employers include searching candidates in Monster’s RésuméDatabase tool, building the company’s own private candidate database with thetool Career Site Hosting, leveraging the company’s brand by letting candidateslearn more about the company with the tool Employer Profiles, and streamliningthe hiring process with the Hiring Tools, Applicant Tracking, and CandidateScreening products In addition, Monster also provides unique solutions to thelarge workforce moving from one location to another To this segment, it offersservices such as finding a local real estate agent, getting instant mortgage rates,and planning the move within a short period of time These services are provided

on Monstermoving.com, positioned as “Your One-Stop Moving Resource.”

There was considerable confusion as to which company was the market leader

in online jobs marketspace in India According to some estimates, JobsAhead.comhas a 40% share of the online jobs market, while monster.com has another 25%

“Together, we will be almost twice as large as the next player [Naukri.com],”Dalmia of JobsAhead.com added.7 According to comScore MediaMetrix, which

is an international company that independently tracks traffic on the Internet,Monster and JobsAhead together received 55 lacs unduplicated (i.e., unique)visitors in April 2004 compared with 26 lacs for the nearest competitor Despitethe recent merger of its two competitors, JobsAhead.com and Monster, Naukri.comsaid it was well poised to achieve 100% sales growth in the current fiscal over

the previous year’s Rs 220 million On the merger of JobsAhead.com withMonster, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of Naukri.com, claimed, “We are ahead

of both JobsAhead.com and Monster combined in terms of traffic, dailyadditions, résumé database, and client base Postmerger, even clients arerealizing the power of Naukri.com as a unified force credibly offering servicesand targeting sales of between Rs 400 million and Rs 450 million over sales of

Rs 220 million in 2003–04.”8

Marketing Strategy of Naukri.com

Initial Marketing Strategy (1997–2000)

The initial marketing strategy was geared toward fulfilling two objectives Thefirst objective was to get the companies and placement consultants to list theirjobs on the Web site and the second one was to get job seekers to visit the site.Toward achieving the first objective, an intensive search exercise was carriedout The team went through the previous issues of several newspapers andmagazines, went to libraries, scanned Yellow Pages, and built a mailing list thatcontained names and addresses of approximately 24,000 companies and place-ment consultants who had placed an advertisement for jobs in the last 5 years.Letters were mailed out to them with information about the service At the sametime, another list of newspapers and magazines was compiled Letters were alsosent to these newspapers and magazines informing them of the introduction ofthis unique service Advertising was also done but on a very small scale It wasrestricted to small-classified displays in newspapers In effect, initially, themarketing strategy of Naukri.com was based on direct mailing and it was actually

a very low cost one

Current Marketing Strategy (2001–2004)

The marketing strategy currently being followed by Naukri.com is a pronged” one, in the words of its marketing manager, Ayesha Kapur Naukri.comreaches out to two segments primarily—job seekers and employers To reach out

“two-to recruiters, Naukri.com has a 130–140-strong sales force across the countrythat goes around and meets clients face-to-face, introduces them to the products,and explains them The mechanism adopted to reach out to the other segment,that is, job seekers, is aggressive advertising Aggressive advertising has keptmomentum only during the last year (2003–2004) Naukri.com has been adver-

tising on television and the print media and is now exploring radio as a mediumfor advertising its services and products Advertisement on television hasincluded promotion during the India–Australia cricket game series telecast on

the national television network, Doordarshan, in the year 2001.

Such aggressive advertising is a new feature of Naukri.com Earlier, when thecompany was a start-up and revenue was not as much as it is today, advertisingwas done on a much smaller scale Says Ayesha Kapur, “So 2 years ago, whenour revenues were about Rs 4 crores, accordingly the ad budget was somethingsmaller than what it was last year This year we are targeting Rs 20 crores.Accordingly our ad budgets have also grown.”

For the year 2004, the marketing budget of Naukri.com is close to Rs 4–5 crores.The figure of how much to spend on advertising is arrived at by taking intoconsideration a number of factors such as what needs to be done in north, south,east, or west India, which media to use for advertising, and so on Also, thecompany is now looking at advertising as more of an investment rather than anexpense

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is of the opinion that a service should be advertised only

if advertising is producing results According to him, Naukri.com did notadvertise aggressively earlier because it “did not have the wherewithal to takeadvantage of advertising.” Now that the market is booming, management atNaukri.com believes that this is the right time to advertise Therefore, whenNaukri.com was a start-up, focus was on development of business, growingproducts, and increasing product offerings Once venture capital funding wastaken, a conscious decision was taken to shift focus to grow business, invest ininfrastructure, develop offices all over the country, and advertise

Alliances with Other Organizations

Media alliances with various media houses such as Hindustan Times, New

Indian Express, and The Telegraph, also form a part of the marketing strategy

of Naukri.com The management says that it also considers itself a mediacompany It has a certain reach and the newspapers have their own reach.Therefore, there are always some people that Naukri.com manages to reach andsome people that the newspaper houses manage to reach The deals thus sealedrequire the newspapers to provide some advertising space to Naukri.com.Naukri.com, on its part, promotes these newspapers on its Web site, in abartering kind of arrangement These alliances, thus, give the company frequentadvertising and also save the company a lot of money

Advertising over the Internet is primarily accomplished by means of allianceswith established sites such as MSN and Yahoo! In these deals, MSN or Yahoo!

places a banner or a text link on their site Depending on the number of throughs, number of CV registrations, and number of banner impressions,payment is made to MSN and Yahoo! There is no revenue-sharing arrangementbetween Naukri.com and MSN or Yahoo! The objectives of online advertisingare similar to that of television and print advertising—drive CV registration Butpromotion over television and print has the additional objective of branding, which

click-is not there in Internet advertclick-ising

Positioning of Naukri.com

The services of Naukri.com are positioned in a different fashion for job seekersand employers The positioning for employers is end-to-end recruitment solu-tions For some key clients, Naukri.com has done first round of short-listing, andorganized walk-in interviews, but those types of services are rendered to onlykey accounts

For job seekers, the positioning is essentially in terms of the largest database ofjobs that Naukri.com claims to have in its possession It also claims to have jobs

in its database that are of much superior quality as compared to the jobs in thedatabase of the competitors Value proposition is also a part of the positioning.Naukri.com promises the following advantages to its customers, both job seekersand employers:

• National and global reach

• Recruitment costs reduced by 80%

• Hiring cycle time reduced by over 60%

• Reduced junk and irrelevant responses

• Confidentiality

• Several options to suit varying recruitment needs

• Management of responses through Naukri.com’s e-recruitment softwareapplication

Product/Service Development at Naukri.com

The sales force of Naukri.com is in constant touch with its clients The sales teambrings back feedback on a daily basis This forms the major source of intelligenceand is one of the main inputs that go into new product development The needs