So Naukri (infoedge) has announced its plan to enter the fresher jobs market by launching firstnaukri.com. Firstnaukri.com was first launched by Piper Serica in 2005 and it was often confused as a naukri.com company at that time. How do I know all this? Well at that time I started Jobs4Freshers.com a jobsites which as its apparent was also targetting the freshers space.

I have rarely blogged about Jobs4freshers.com on WATBlog because I never thought it was big enough to talk about but it was my first company at the age of 20 and was probably the most enriching experience in the entrepreneurial career in the last 3 years. They say mistakes make you learn and I probably made all of them with Jobs4freshers.com which was run by me as a solo entrepreneur for most part of its existence. (Note: Jobs4freshers.com is no longer functional though I still own the domain, database etc)

Some Statistics from Jobs4freshers to give you an idea if I am qualified to talk about this space:

Resumes – 40,000, Job Postings – 1500+ Employers – 500+, Revenue – 3 lakh + (most job postings were free). This was over a period of a year. Jobs4freshers was operationally breakeven as it was just me running the show and hence we had no overheads. I failed at a lot of things then but more on that in another post someday..

So Naukri entering the freshers space almost a decade + later that its generic jobs space! One may ask why did it take sooo long for naukri when players were in this space way back in 2005?

Here is my take based on all the experiences I had during my 1 1/2 year stint of bootstrapping a freshers job site.

1) Employers dont care about/pay for Freshers – See the issue is fresher are a dime a dozen and more often than not most companies get inundated with fresher resumes the moment they are about to pass third year. So essentially employers have little or no value for freshers resumes. To give you a deeper insight most job sites would hardly pay 30-40 rupees for a fresher resume to Search engine marketing companies in some cased they wont pay at all. The highest value resumes are 5 year + experience ones.

2) Pain Point is at freshers end but they have no money/credit cards – The real painpoint is at freshers end if you ask me. Because they are the one’s that desperately need to kick off their careers. Mind you Ive seen some cover letters which are so badly written that you will appalled to know that these freshers are actually engineers from english medium colleges. Clearly the pain point is at the freshers end but they have no payment capacity beyond say Rs.500/1000 and most of them wont have credit cards so even if you plan to charge them Rs.500 there is no cost effective way of collecting the same.

3) Freshers dont remain freshers once they get a job – Redundant database is what this space suffers from so if you do spend marketing dollars in getting that resume whether that fresher gets a job through your jobsite or through any other once he is employed he is no longer a fresher. Also most freshers would ideally like to complete a year or two before quitting their first jobs as it “looks good” on their resumes. This is possibly the reason FirstNaukri failed because it spent a decent amount of marketing dollars on acquiring resumes which was a mistake.

Given the issues above.. Why is Naukri entering this space now?

1) Last 3 years of growth = Shortage of talent at lower levels – In the last 3 years the Indian corporate scene has seen tremendous growth and that has lead to an shortage of quality staff even at teh lower levels.

2) Employer Branding key issue to attract good talent at the base level – Comapnies like HCL, Directi which are fairly large now are trying to attract the cream talent away from the regular top companies like Infosys, Wipro, Goldman Sach’s and others.For such companies employer branding is key. Even SME’s need to indulge in employer branding inorder to attract the top talent away from the large companies given the severe talent crunch.

3) Naukri best positioned to play the volumes game – See naukri has built probably the most recognised brand name in the jobs space and the last I heard was that they would attract 5000+ fresher resumes a day with no effort at all. For them to start Firstnaukri is just a database query segragation of existing resumes and they can easily claim to have the largest fresher resume database. All these factors given they also need to connect with the youth which is their primary audience for shiksha.com so it all fits in for them!

What Naukri should keep in mind?

The key challenge is where will first naukri earn its revenue from? - As stated earlier naukri would find it difficult to convince recruiters to spend their money on freshers. So finding alternate revenue streams that are scalable would be key.

Branding and Ad Revenue should be looked at - Naukri should build Firstnaukri in a way that it becomes a hub for employer branding solutions as thats a need I see growing multi fold in the years to come.

Building a self sustaining community around content - Most freshers would be active users of the web and hence this is an opportunity for building a community around career related content for freshers. Once a community is formed it has a premium value and very low cost as the community grows on its own. Though seeding a community in the first place would be a big challenge. My recommendation would be to focus on building this community.

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