Recap 2009: Job Sites & Recruitment Portals
2009 wasn’t by any imagination the best year for Job sites and recruitment portals. The year started with some bad news by leading Job site Naukri.com Founder stating on video that there was a drop in hiring. Then came the shut down news of Techtribe and Yellojobs both of whom were funded by VC’s to penetrate the jobs market in India. Around the same time naukri launched its freshers portal in firstnaukri.com.
Though naukri showed decent financial results in Q3 and Q4 it still maintained that this was a period of slow growth for the space. So while referral sites like Techtribe were shutting down newer players like Zyoin were coming to the fore which pointed towards opportunities in niche recruitment space. Even naukri kept innovating during the first half of the year by launching new features like chatbots.
By the middle of the year the overall job scene started to improve or atleast thats what Naukri’s own jobspeak survey was suggesting. Seeing this competing jobsites started making progress so Monster tied up with Dish TV on DTH and also launched Rural jobsite while Timesjobs announced campus direct which was in direct competition with Naukri’s FirstNaukri.com.
Activity from Naukri’s side picked up as well with the launch of Paycheck a salary calculator. The second half of the year brought out innovations from Clickjobs which launched the pay per contact model and from Timesjobs which launched the Globalconnect platform.
By the year end the big news of Linkedin launching in India was announced! I know many people may say that isn’t a Job site but it still is competition to naukri.com and others. Naukri reacted to this by launching premium jobs section for experienced professionals.
All in all the year 2009 wouldnt be one that they would like to remember. Its one where a few of them shutdown and one where there was considerable slow growth. Though the markets seem to have picked up only time will tell what 2010 has instore for the job portals.
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Very nice summary. The performance of job sites are directly linked to the economic & hence the hiring trends. Therefore they cannot be really blamed for the sluggish growth. What the year has shown is the aggressive spirit of innovation that the new job boards have shown especially yellojobs.com on referrals, clickjobs.com on pay per CV and techtribe.com on technical referrals. Probably their models were not matched with the best timing in India but they are definitely how the future could look like – “Pay per performance”. Naukri.com innovated with the fresh funds and so did Monsterindia.com with their deep pockets and survived. Timesjobs.com has more or less disintegrated & disappeared from the market and so have dice.com after their break up with cybermedia. Kudos to the innovators of 2009. Given the innovation benchmarks, it will be interesting to see how the recruitment space looks like when the markets bounce back.
Hello Rajiv,
We believe that you forgot to mention about http://Naukriforwomen.com which was launched in early 2009 and it has picked up more than 3000 registered employer and more than 100,000 registered women job seeker.
Thanks,
Radhika
Rajiv : but what about others ? Only Naukri.. timesjobs and other site has done a little bit improvments.
Rajiv,
I guess Freshersworld.com was a site which required to be mentioned here. This is the fourth JOb site in India after Naukri, MOnster & Times acroding to Alexa ranking.
Freshersworld did its golden performance this year still being in a niche space.
Bye
Alex