To think or to google

Just came back today from Mumbai after a really eventful weekend. Lots of development on the personal and the professional front. Anyways that comes later.

On my way back I read an interesting article by Andrew Sullivan in the Times of India, something which talks about how Internet has been effecting our thinking and reading habits. It was a great read, especially when I had no Internet connection handy and I had deliberately left my cell phone switched off.

Some things to ponder upon

• How many times do you really go watch a movie or read a book before you have read its review somewhere on the net?
• How many times do you bother to pick up a book to research a topic
• Do you read a restaurant review before you head out there for a dinner
• Do you also keep clicking on every link you come across a web page before you reach the end of the page

Internet has been one of the greatest tools for disseminating information but also at the same time we are becoming used to a kind of life where we hit the Internet for any curious thought. We are unknowingly becoming more and more impatient when it comes to reading or applying some original thought to any event or occurrence.

Andrew Sullivan writes in the article ” The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. I would carry a single book around with me for days when younger, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say — the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.“

With a deluge of information we are slowly building up enormous capability to scour through it but at the same time we remain detached and quite often unaffected.

Quoting from the article again “Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information, but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it. Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them“

To the questions I have listed above, I do all of it. I read reviews of books before I buy them, the same goes for visiting a restaurant or going for a movie. And quite often while browsing I end up at pages totally unrelated to what I had started from, all because I clicked on most of the links I came across on the page.  And when I have an opinion, I go online to check what others feel about it and I do get influenced by  the opinions of some unknown people out there. I sometimes wonder if so much of information available so easily will take the fun out of the small surprises life has in store for us. Quite often before I visit a place I know which restaurant to go , which route to take, what to buy and what all places are there for sightseeing. Because  I had googled for it the previous night.

Yes, I Google quite often then I think or explore anything…..what do you do?

Off and on

Last couple of days have been a mixed bag for me. After a lot of planning I could finally take a break from my not so hectic schedule( I have seen worser days) and what a break it has been. I first decided to take a train to Mumbai. Bangalore to Mumbai is a full 24 hours train journey. It took me back to my college days where I would travel for 52 hours to reach home from college.The  only thing you could do was sleep ,eat and sleep again. Well hats off to Laloo ( and his team at rail mantralaya) trains are comfortable and cleaner. And with functional charging points available in plenty, I could very well enjoy long stored movies on my laptop, a good amount of sleep and treat myself to some greasy but tasty grub which they sell in the trains .

With crude hitting new highs every other day , the airlines tickets are becoming more and more expensive by day. That’s still OK when you compare the time taken to travel but when it comes to flying out of Bangalore I would prefer taking a train for shorter journeys. It takes approximately two and half hours from my place to the airport. It makes no sense to fly to places like Chennai, Hyderabad and Mangalore .I was wondering why can’t we have a dedicated rail track to Airport from the City railway station. We can have check in counters at the railway station itself. Imagine you can go to the railway station, check in there, hop on to a train and reach the airport in less then an hour. And also imagine the amount of fuel saving possible.

Anyway before I digress further, the main reason why I am off blogging is the painfully slow and intermittent connectivity offered by my reliance data card. This is the second time I got taken in by this piece of s*** sold by Reliance under the garb uninterrupted connectivity. Couple of things which I have observed with Reliance. They are very prompt when it comes to reminding you to pay your bill. They will never mail you the bills and expect you to pay on time.Its only when the due date is over they will inundate you with reminder calls and SMSes. It has the worst customer care you will ever come across. Nothing gets resolved there ,its just that you end up wasting your time and keep talking to some ten different people every-time you call them.

Well till I get back to my regular broadband, I will have to bear with this and so will I be (Off and On)-line , at the mercy of datacard.So before I get disconnected again, I am hitting the publish button.

Reviewing employers

Somebody just sent me a link to a site called workexp.com , a place where you can share your opinion with others about your employer. I have seen a few more like jobgypsy.com and criticat . Something useful , I would say. Here’s my take on these sites.

Criticat

This site has been there for quite sometime . The first post in the criticat official blog was on Aug -07. Among the three sites I checked criticat seems to score better in terms of layout and features. It has a well defined rating mechanism for a fairly comprehensive set of parameters. You can rate your employer negative too. Something an unhappy employee would like to make good use of. You can advice your employer , discuss  and share your opinion with other users. The best feature I liked was “Shout”. Something like one thing which you would do if you were the CEO. Read it , some of the shouts are really good.

Workexp.com

This seems more like a very well managed blog actually. However the categories here are more imaginative unlike criticat, so if you are someone who enjoys your office gossip and likes sharing it ,with other folks , I think you will like it. You might come across the juiciest tidbits like layoffs , scams , frauds etc. Like one funny bit of news was some kinda strike by infy cab drivers. Overall I found this more engaging and has a more community feel to it.

Jobgypsy

Nothing much to write about. Quite ordinary actually. A few standard fields like review of work culture, and future prospects, salary and recruitment process. The review qualities are very average.

Criticat has got quite a large number of reviews on the site, but however not all very useful. The concept of asking employees to review employers sounds great in principle , but without much community participation , it doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere. We still tend to restrict our opinion about employers to ourselves and friends. Very few take the pain of sharing it an online forum.

Meanwhile if you have some time read this blog. Something to read about Microsoft India. There seem to be some folks who have a lot to share about their employer.

Indian Internet survey

I happened to read about the the Juxt consult research “India Online 2008″. The general stats go like

• The regular internet user is up by 19% to 30 million and the total Internet user population is 35 million
• 30 million are urban users and 5 million rural population
• 77% of users belong to the age group of 19 - 35 %

Some of the top activities of the internet users are

• Emailing - 91%
• Job Search - 72%
• Messaging - 70%
• Reading news - 63 %
• Sports - 57%
• Multimedia download - 54%
• Dating /friendship - 50%
• Matrimonial search - 49%
• Search engines - 49 %

Coming to what interests me most ,job boards. Naukri.com is preferred by 42% users in India , monster stands at 25 % and Timesjobs comes at 16%. So naukri seems to be way ahead of the others.

There has been a post on watblog on the juxt consult report and has put across some interesting analysis and points.

Btw another interesting piece of news ( or rumour) that Reliance ( ADAG ) seems to be planning to come with a Job portal. It would be interesting to see what they have to offer. But the fun part of things is whenever you have competition , there is a lot of poaching of staff. Whether the business works or not , there is a happy guy with a fatter pay check.

I am all inspired

I was just reading through some posts on a slew on “Me too” portals hitting the Indian web space. There is no denying the fact that once we have a seen a new concept , any new portal , it is followed by a few more similar ones. And they all claim to be “Different” and “Better” than the other.

I have compiled this list, not exhaustive, I am sure there would be many I would have missed. Secondly I have just listed down the names without accounting who came first. In fact this post had a long draft life. It has been in the making for more then three weeks. I have put the categories and then kept adding the portal names as and when I came across any names

1. Travel sites : Makemytrip , Yatra, ezeego1, cleartrip, travelguru, travelchacha ( They have the funniest TV Commercial ), flightraja ( this is called Via now )

2. Real estate : 99acres, makaan, magicbricks, indiaproperties

3. Recruitment portals : TechTribe, Reffster, Wisestepp, Toostep

4. Online Community : Minglebox , DesiMartini, BigAdda, Indyarocks, Ibibo. I have intentionally left out Orkut, facebook and few others

5. Photo Printing : Picsquare , merasnap, iTasveer

6. Movie rentals : Seventymm, bigflix, Moviemart, Clixfix, Bigflix

7. Great Indian Shaadi business : This segment seems to be going the travel site way, more sites coming up on a regular basis. After the likes of shaadi.com, simplymarry.com, bharatmatrimony, jeevansaathi.com now we have secondshaadi.com and metroshaadi.com

8. SMS advertising : MGinger, Youmint, sms2india, admad.mobi, 160by2.com

I can recall a few more in categories like video sharing, automobile, photosharing etc. If you look at sites mentioned above most of them seem to be doing quite fine. At least in terms of keeping themselves visible ( at least I remember the names ). Does this imply that the pie is big enough for everyone to survive or we need to wait for some more time to see how many survive.

There is no denying that all of the above sites are inspired ones. And quite often we have seen the “inspired sites “and so called “tried and tested” stuffs catching the interests of the money bags. I call such instances as “All inspiration and little perspiration”.

But at the same time the simple thing would be to let the market forces decide what survies and what does not. The internet space can accomodate a lot of players and finally at the end of the day the fittest will survive. for the time being I feel even I should get inspired and see if I land somewhere.

Great Places to work

This post is quite late actually , somehow happened to miss out on this bit of news.  Great Place to Work® Institute India has come up with the list of best places to work in India for the year 2008. This is an annual report released by this Institute

And the top 25 companies for the year 2008 are

1 RMSI Private Limited

2 Marriott Hotels India Pvt. Ltd.

3 Google India Pvt. Ltd

4 Agilent Technologies

5 Classic Stripes Private Limited

6 American Express

7 Cadbury India Ltd.

8 NTPC Limited

9 Godrej Consumer Products Ltd.

10 Hilti India Private Limited

11 SCOPE International Private Limited

12 QUALCOMM INDIA Private Ltd.

13 Intel Tech India Pvt. Ltd.

14 MindTree Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

15 Computer Sciences Corporation Pvt. Ltd.

16 Federal Express Corporation

17 Aditya Birla Management Corporation Limited

18 Johnson & Johnson Limited

19 Adobe Systems India Pvt Ltd

20 Forbes Marshall Group

21 InterGlobe Enterprises Ltd.

22 Intelenet Global Services

23 Aviva Life Insurance Company India Ltd.

24 Bajaj Capital Limited

25 Sierra Atlantic Software Services Ltd.

For the next 25 you can go here.

I checked out the 2007 ranks .Some of the names which were there in the top 25 for the year 2007 are either missing in latest ranks or have slipped ranks. Tavant is not in the top 50 this year,whereas they were at 17th place last year. I am not sure of the reasons, maybe they didn’t participate in the surveys.SAP has slipped out from the top 25, but is still there in the next 25. RMSI has been taking the top honors and is at the top of the list this year too.

To know more about the evaluation process you can check out their website. There are some good tips on what makes a workplace good and its benefits.

Best Indian Job site ?

In response to my previous post on 30 best job sites in US, somebody asked which is the best Indian one. Sadly there is no survey which points this out. I haven’t come across any kind of survey which rates the job portals based on user feedback. All what I have seen is claims and I will not buy a rating of the sites based on the size of their database alone. As a job seeker that may not be the first thing which I would be looking for. However just for the records this is what some of these sites claim ( Source: Official websites )

• Naukri claims over 12 million resumes
• MonsterIndia too claims 12 million resumes
• Jobstreet says 4 million , but I am not sure whether its only Indian database
• Timesjobs claims 8 million
• ClickJobs says 3 Million “fresh” resume . I don’t know what they mean by “fresh”

The Indian recruitment industry is roughly around Rs 5000 crore and the online business was around Rs 241 crores for the year 06-07. It has been showing around 60% growth rate so by simple extrapolation it should be around 400 crores odd now . That does imply there is a huge potential for the online business to grow. A lot of entreprenuers are eyeing this space and trying to carve out a niche for themselves. In a previous post I had covered referral based hiring. This ain’t anything new actually . There have been a few referral portals in US since quite sometime and they couldn’t create much of an impact. If you look deeply, the entire new generation of job portals seem to be trying to compete with likes of Naukri and Monster and just hope that they can lure away some of the users.

I think we need to apply a little more thought on to how the entire recruitment industry functions now and what can make the various interactions simpler and more efficient. For example ,One thing which I fail to understand is why should I pay to have my job listings displayed. These portals build their database by using it as an attraction for job seekers to upload resume on the portals and then the same database access is sold for a price.

What we need is a more democratic approach to things. We need specialised job boards and the same can be integrated with various online communities , supported by strong applicant tracking system. Just my views , do let me know what do you think of it .

Getting spammed

Before starting, I will accept that I am also guilty of spamming sometime in the past, albeit indirectly. If you have been in recruiting, you must have spammed. With clients screaming for more resumes, recruiters resort to lot of unintelligent stuff and they tend to send out a lot of unsolicited and utterly inappropriate mails.

I guess almost all of you would be getting mails from some friend to join him/her on a particular community site . I often keep ignoring such invite mails. Quite a few of us don’t mind opening up our address books to be used by these websites. Perhaps we need to exercise a little restraint before we send mails to everyone in our addressbook. If you know your friends well, you would know their interests so send them stuff of their choice, I am sure they would appreciate this.

The funniest thing which I came across recently was mails from few sites who somehow had managed to get a long list of mail ids and had been sending out mails religiously, they had put a message in the finest print at the bottom of the page “ Click here to unsubscribe”.To me , this is something which defies all logic. Can somebody tell me when did I subscribe before they sent me a mail like this .If I want to keep my inbox clean then this means extra work for me. I will have to go clicking unsubscribe on each of these mails.

Gmail does a good job filtering spam,but a lot of spamming happens under the garbs of referrals made by contacts. And there seems to be no way out how I can avoid this. My mail box gets loads of it , my scrapbook gets it and now my mobile phone is getting them too. And the problem is quite a lot of it comes from people/service provider I know. I am not sure how you can avoid getting spammed, but I can point out trigger points when you can expect some spam to flow in.

• When you have posted your resume on a job portal
• When you join a social networking site
• When you list yourself on your alumni site
• When you dropped your visiting card in some mall
• when you enquired for any kind of financial product/service

So till we have a solution or we netizens start exercising some discretion,enjoy your spam meal.

Crunch can be funny

There was this interesting article on infosys that I read on rediff today. Infosys plans to add around 25,000 people this financial year. The current headcount at the end of FY 07-08 stood at 91,187 compared to 88,601 at end of FY-07. Adding 25,000 people against rising talent shortage and demands like greater representation of locals may not be very easy.

Coming to the funny part of the story, it seems Infy’s pune centre can be delayed by six months. And thats because there are not enough construction workers there .Blame it on whomsoever you want to , after MNS agitation against outsiders in Maharastra there has been a mass exodus of workers and labourers. Infy board member Mr. TV Mohandas Pai says that the number of construction workers at the Infy pune site has come down to between 1,300 and 1,500 against 2,800 a few months back. Imagine 50% of your staff missing. Somebody will have to be a genius to do a contingency planning for a situation like this.

On a serious note, we are going to have a tough time getting enough talent to sustain the current economic growth levels. With salary wages going high, high attrition and inadequate number of quality ,employable graduates coming out of schools some serious effort is required. The IT industry will have to work real hard to manage their prices and profitability.

Shine.com is quite good !!!

I had been planning to check out Shine.com since quite some time. They have been very aggressive with their marketing efforts, a little too aggressive I would say. There have been a few voices about some kind of spamming over orkut. I am not sure of this, I haven’t come across any.

Coming to site, the UI looks great. Compared to the other job portals, its much better. The name is a nice one too. I had read a few reviews about shine previously. And quite a few of them actually questioned the idea of launching a Job portal first place. Lot of people slammed it as a “Me too” from HT media.Well I believe that the online recruitment industry is yet to be exploited thoroughly. So a product which is good and better then the rest will gain acceptance,provided they keep walking the right path. It might take sometime, but as long as you have deep pockets like those of HT media, whats the harm. And secondly considering the fact that HT has a huge print inventory, an online arm does make sense.

Coming to Shine, I spent around an hour on the site checking out the features and comparing it with few others portals. Here’s what I felt about it.

1. Registration : Initially I faced problems registering on the site , kept getting “session expired” message. I guess they need to sort out the glitches. But the registration forms are well designed and they cover a quite a lot of details without allowing the sense of fatigue to seep in unlike Naukri.The registration process seems to have been designed in order to get a good snap shot of the resume which would help in job matching. The info is well segmented and looks neat. As you keep progressing with the registration , there is lot of prompting for the next fields, that makes the process lucid and quick.

2. Job Search: Once you are done with the registration it allows you to either do a job search yourself or you can look at the recommended jobs. The suggested matches were quite close. It seems shine search is powered by redmatch. Who’s complaining, as long as you get good results. You can choose to view, delete, block any employers ,add a personal note to it for later use and obviously apply. The UI scores here again. The entire design makes it very easy to use. Also when you apply for a particular job , there is a self screening system.You need to provide experience details in various required skill sets. Apart from this you can always keep a track of your applications

3. Research and career advice: There is a quite a bit of information to help you identify companies . They are trying to rope in a lot of people for career advice and have built a decent amount of information about various verticals. There is stuff related to news and latest developments etc . You don’t need to register to explore these features, so go ahead and check it out.

On the whole a Job seeker will enjoy the features at Shine, I need to check for the recruiters also. Maybe once I am able to get an recruiter account , I will try and explore that too.

I think Firefly has a good product in Shine, now its all about geting enough job listing and candidate resumes. The HT release says that they already have 1.25 lakh candidate registrations and 4000 recruiter accounts. For any job site it is very important that they build the critical mass before users realise that the stuff is missing. As a job seeker I wouldn’t like to wait for listing to come on to shine, I will go any place where I get it. So is with a recruiter, any portal which has a good database will do .

But I do have great hopes on Shine.com and it will be nice to see how naukri,timesjob respond to the competition.