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.

Referral Portals will they work???

In response to my previous post about the slew of job portals hitting the on-line recruitment space, I got a few mails which refuted the idea of stand alone job portals and were more inclined towards community based job portals.

To begin with ,for any concept to be successful it has to, either address a pain area or should be so disruptive that it changes how businesses are done. A concept which aims to solve a pain area or just a gap may run into scalability issues. The only runaway successes have been concepts which turned things on their head. However innovation is the key here. The starting points for an entrepreneur can be anything. He may start by addressing a gap and then keep improving and innovating with time.

Coming to whats happening in the online recruitment space. There are loads of people trying to get into this space and everyone is taking pot shots at the Big daddies like Naukri and monster. In my previous post I had mentioned how people are battling the talent crunch by trying to reach out to the passive job seekers.

That essentially requires the recruiters go where the potential hire is available or create “honey traps” for the candidate. “Honey Trap” is an interesting thing,I have borrowed it from the espionage lingo , read about it here . When I say “Honey trap” it can be a compelling content or rewards or networking features. And this is what all new portals are trying to do .

I will not get into details of the features of these portals, but rather share my views on the fundamentals driving these portals. They have the same revenue model , referral based hiring. It seems to be a good and simple model. Get the job listings , get people on to the portal and pay them for referrals. Bingo, you have a money machine up and cranked. But will the money flow ? I have my doubts about it.

The biggest drawback with any referral based system is lack of accountability. As a portal you can bring people to your site through variety of means, but the quality and the quantity of referrals cannot be moderated. As an hiring manager I will be working according to a time based plan. I expect a certain number of suitable resumes in pipleline to meet my hiring targets.A referral portal can control the quality of resumes but getting the right volume at the right time is the key. To crack this problem they need to have a mammoth active user base and this is not an easy task. And also hope that they keep making more and more referrals.

During my discussion with hiring managers, one question which always used to crop up was “How do you ensure that candidates will join? “. This is a genuine problem for which the referral model has no answer. Collecting multiple job offers is quite common these days and so are no “No shows”. A referral portal which can come up with a solution for this can surely beat the pack, till then they will see their bottomlines suffering because of this.

Recruitment business usually has long payment cycles, this may effect the referrer community interest.Only portals which have compelling content, strong community orientation can manage this. Portals which predominantly focus only on building network and referrals will suffer because of this.We might see the interest of the referrer community wane once they realise that it may take sometime before they start seeing the money rolling in. Another of my concerns is the amount of spamming the referral portals will allow. With people sending invite to anyone and everyone , be ready to see loads of job invites, relevant and quite often irrelevant, in your mail box.

It took quite some time for Jobster to gain acceptance in US and the Indian market will take sometime to mature. For the sites which came early, the growth has not been along the expected lines. As I said in the beginning people just trying to fill in the gaps will not succeed. But if they keep improving and innovating we might see some serious competition for Naukri and monster.Don’t ask me what kind of innovations , If I had an answer I would have a raked in a moolah from it.

 

Getting the right guy for your venture

In my previous post ” Hiring woes for startups” I had covered a few areas where entrepreneurs often face problem in hiring. One of the major problems has been meeting the salary expectations.

When you begin hiring , the first thing to be done is framing the job description. You need to identify the “Person” you want to hire. And when I say a “person”, it includes all desirable attributes . Well it seems like an easy task , but it’s here where often the first mistake is committed. I have seen a lot of Job descriptions and they seem to demand for super-humans actually. Please pardon me if I sound cynical, but that’s true. Be practical is what I would say. My word of advice will be, spend some time on doing a bit of your own research.

Firstly, decide the skill sets and be realistic about it. Don’t expect the guy to know everything , trust me I have seen loads of JD’s where people try to cram in a lot of things.If you have to ,put it in under different headings like “Must have” and “Desirable”. It makes things easier for your recruiter also. I have come across of tech startups who always want an Computer Science graduate from IITs and top NITs only. Do demand one if you are going to put the guy to good use, otherwise don’t.You might end up with an expensive , under-utilized resource in hand. And apart from the technical skills , you obviously need a team guy ,should have good communication skills and a great attitude towards work.

Coming to the compensation part, do conduct a research on the prevailing salary levels. Now since you know the kind of person you want to hire , so go and check the salaries for such resources. And please set your expectations right. If possible get someone to do a salary survey for you. I have met a large number of startups for whom salary was not a concern and when the time came to make an offer , they were not able to meet the expectations. You might meet some candidates who are very impressed with your venture and are keen to join you. They want to get into a startup for the exposure and learning , but that doesn’t mean they will come for a lesser salary. The reality is people tend to ask for higher salary as a trade-off for the risks associated with startups. You have to accept this and work around it. So when you are doing your budgeting , do account this too and do it before you kick-start your hiring process.Convey your salary budgets well in advance to your vendors. It saves their time and yours too.

Lot of candidates don’t value stock options and would rather prefer to have a bigger base salary. You actually can’t blame them. The ecosystem has yet to mature. How many people have really seen the gains out of stock options. As an entrepreneur you may appreciate the value of equity and stocks but to expect it of every hire may not be possible. And with Fringe benefit tax on ESOP they are less appealing. So use ESOP only for a person who would appreciate it well. A better thing would be to come up with a good combination of fixed and variable salary. Catch hold of someone who can do it for you, it will be worth the effort.

And as I had mentioned in my previous post, start with your network to identify the hires. Ask your friends for references. Apply your planning on them first and keep improvising always. It is advisable to get the first few guys through reference. A smart idea would be to rope in a few guys you have worked with previously.

While planning your venture you would have thought of backup plans for various eventualities . Do the same for your hiring also and include plenty of buffer everywhere. With the jobs chasing good folks, people do accept multiple offers and pick one finally. Make sure that if you have a decline at hand , you have a replacement ready. So even if you have picked a great guy, keep looking for more.

And finally if someone wouldn’t join you because your office isn’t a great looking one or you don’t have a company transport, don’t bother at all. Thank your stars, because you just saved yourself of a wrong hire.

Hiring woes for Startups

Hiring the right fit is always a challenge, particularly for startups. While browsing through blogs of entrepreneurs trying to hire for their startups , I somehow find them all to be very similar. Inadvertently there has to be one post which is about hiring woes . They all go on and on, why it is so difficult to hire. A few reasons which seem to be in every post is

• ” The office which is not snazzy enough”
• ” The salary is less”
• ” There is no company transport” or
• ” Stock options are fine, I am looking for little higher fixed salary “
• And finally ” Any on-site opportunities ?”

With all the constraints of starting up I completely agree with the fact ,that hiring is no easy task. Since you have to hire to grow, an entrepreneur will have to spend a lot of time and effort in identifying the right people. The most unfortunate thing ever to happen to a startup is inability to scale up at the right time. And in order to be successful you have to handle the entire exercise in a different manner.

The first word of advice,”Be prepared to hear all variety of reasons ,few insane ones also, on why your startup is not exciting enough”. I remember a particular guy who was working with one of the big Indian IT services firm and he had an offer from an networking startup.He was a computer science graduate from a premier NIT He finally declined the offer and the reason he put forth was hilarious. It seems his father was against this , because first place ,he had never heard the name of this startup before and secondly he felt that being in an unknown company will hamper his marriage prospects. I am sure many of you would have a variety of anecdotes like this to share. Would appreciate if you can share some here.

Secondly remember this is a job seekers market and you are the seller. You have to sell your story to the candidate. Sharpen your sales skill, you would be needing it a lot. Since you are already on with your venture so I am sure you would be confident about the success of it. The same confidence has to replicated in every interaction with your potential hires.Communication is the key here.

Appreciate the candidate and his abilities and most importantly his time. You might be having a hectic day with meetings stretching beyond the stipulated time. However make sure your telecons happen on time or you dont’t make the guy wait in the reception for long. And if possible avoid last minute cancellations. In the worst case if you have to , better you convey it yourself rather then asking your recruiters to do it. Ask your other team members to also follow this. The impressions being created here are of the company so every person will have to play ana active role in this.

When you are selling a job , remember you need to showcase a certain aspects about your company. Namely the venture concept, business domain , the founding team and if you are funded, highlight that as well. And if you are not funded yet, be frank about your plans. Tell your hires how you plan to take care of the money part. Preferably start off your hiring process with a general discussion round. You can guess a lot of things about person over a cup of coffee,so do that.

This post is turning out to be a long one and I will take a pause here. I will try to cover the salary aspects in the next post and also a few things on checking fitment . Do drop me a mail if you have any queries or some ideas on managing the hiring process. I can be reached at asutosh@gmail.com. Before closing off, tap your network for your first few hires. The referral hires work the best, they come for free and they are quite often more stable.

jobs…. portals and more portals

During the early days when I had just started with my recruiting firm , thats little more then three years back. Me and my partner were listing down what all we need ,to start off . Job portal subscriptions came at the top of the list. How much ever any recruiter claims that he works through references and have their own internal database of resumes, trust me it doesn’t work .

You just don’t need portal subscriptions for resumes alone. There is a plethora of information out there , provided you are smart enough to figure it out. A smart recruiter can spot trends, develop a network among the talent pool and also find out who’s hiring and a lot more info.

But portals like naukri.com and monster have remained more of repositories and job boards. There is not much to be found there . As a job seeker you go there to post your resume. As a recruiter you hunt for the resumes. No-body’s complaining as long as they are getting what they are looking for. And the Job portals are happy selling subscriptions.

But with the talent crunch looming large it becomes imperative for a recruiter to go seek-out for the passive candidate. Somebody is there who fits the bill well but is not looking out. Happily ensconced where he is . He has not listed his resume in the job portal and neither sent you his resume. So do where and how do you find him. You find such people in college alumni sites , community sites . I remember Orkut , yahoo groups were a huge hit. In fact, Orkut still is. Then you had linkedin, zoominfo etc. I am new to Facebook and haven’t explored it much. But I am sure your scrapbooks would always have at least got a few scraps talking about a “Sizzling hot” job opening in an “MNC”. Or got a mail from a recruiter on linkedin. Perfectly fine again. As long as you don’t mind a few irrelevant mails in your inbox.

Then came the school of thought that job boards should be where the community hangs out. Rather then list jobs and expect people to turn, why not the jobs reach them. I had read an interesting post on how social networking sites are giving a new turn to online recruitment. Linkedin is an interesting example.

Somehow I personally don’t endorse this. I go to a particular site for a purpose. If I am on Orkut, its because I want to hang out wiht my friends, on Linkedin I maintain my professional network. I may not always like to see something apart from that. Please treat this as a totally personal view. Lot of folks may not have a problem to this.

I also have been following whats happening in the referral based recruitment portals. I am aware of quite a few. TechTribe , Toostep, Wisestepp, Careerknight, Zubka and Reffster . I am yet to explore Shine.com . They seem to be quite aggressive with their ad campaign. I intend to cover all these sites in seperate posts. So you will have to come back to it . Meanwhile some food for thought. I have this from Alexa.