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.
Posted by asutosh 