THE IDEA OF ‘NAUKRI.COM’, AN online Indian portal that connects job seekers with employers across various industries, came from a couple of seemingly simple observations. Yet embedded within them were profound customer and market insights.
The first dates to 1989, when I was working in the marketing team at HMM Ltd (now GlaxoSmithKline). My colleagues and I would invariably read the fortnightly magazine Business India from the back. In those days, the magazine carried thirty to forty pages of appointment advertisements at the end. Often, my colleagues barely glanced at the editorial content and passed on the magazine after reading only the recruitment ads.
It wasn’t that they were actively looking for jobs. They were working at a good company and doing well in their careers. Back in 1989, if you wanted to work in marketing (not sales) at a multinational fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company headquartered in Delhi, then you were already in the best possible place. In the pre-liberalization era, there were only two or three such companies in Delhi, and they did not hire from each other.
My colleagues were simply interested in staying abreast of what was happening in the job market. They were competitive and wanted to know whether they were missing out on any opportunities or what the current market benchmarks were. Today, we might call this behaviour the fear of missing out, or FOMO.
This practice led to the realization that information about jobs was of great interest to working professionals—even if they weren’t looking to switch, they still wanted to review job listings. Another observation was that every week, two or three headhunters would call one or another of my colleagues. We all sat in an open hall, so I often overheard one side of the conversation. Over time, I noticed a pattern: each call came from a different head-hunter about a different job at a different company. And none of these jobs was advertised in any magazine or newspaper.
This led to another insight: many vacancies across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies were never advertised at all. What appeared in print was merely the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it there was a much larger job market where information was fragmented and not easily accessible to the public.
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Armed with these two insights, I concluded that if someone could aggregate information about all available jobs across companies, it would create a highly valuable database. Of course, there were many hurdles and several unanswered questions: How would we gather job data and keep it current? How would we make this information available to the public? How would the platform be funded, and would companies even pay for such a service?
The idea seemed promising, but I could not answer these key questions satisfactorily. So, it became one of those file-andforget ideas. I eventually quit my job and moved on to conducting salary surveys, followed by a series of small ventures over the next several years.
Then, in 1993, the Department of Telecom (DoT) placed a large advertisement in the Delhi newspapers announcing the launch of a Videotex service in the city. The concept was simple: a central server housed at a telephone exchange would host a series of databases, and fifty public-access terminals across the city would allow people to use these databases for a fee. The advertisement invited applications from Private Information Providers (PIPs)—organizations that would create and maintain databases on the server, with revenue shared between the DoT and the PIP.
We applied to build a jobs database on the Videotex server. Our proposal was accepted, and we began work. Before we could complete the project, however, it was cancelled. Although we had developed the concept and the plan, we had no idea what to do with it in 1993. So, once again, we filed it away and forgot about it. In 1996, I attended the IT Asia expo at Pragati Maidan in Delhi, where I saw the internet for the first time. At the time, there were only 14,000 internet accounts in the country—a number that, to me, seemed very large. That was the moment the penny dropped: a job site on the internet would be a good idea.
We revived our old plan and product concept and quickly moved to implementation. Our approach was to aggregate job listings from newspapers and magazines across the country and upload them to the internet. Almost immediately, the site began to attract traffic, and Naukri.com saw early success.
Over the years, Naukri grew steadily, and we eventually tasted financial success as well. The company went public in 2006, and the platform made a remarkable impact. We effectively organized the Indian market for white-collar jobs in the organized private sector. Today, over 1,00,000 organizations recruit through Naukri, and over seventy million job seekers use the site.
Then we decided to launch a platform for blue-collar jobs—JobHai.com—as Naukri was not well suited to the needs of bluecollar workers. This market operates differently: it is hyperlocal, lacks detailed CVs, relies more on voice interaction over mobile than text or email, depends heavily on walk-in-interviews and frequently requires communication in the vernacular.
Job Hai is seeing initial success. The widespread penetration of mobile data has made this market viable in recent years, whereas earlier attempts by other players struggled to gain traction.
Mobile phones and internet access have made it possible to create a unified market and bring underserved segments of the workforce into the mainstream. This includes enabling more women to join the workforce. But this will be a gradual process. While the technology now exists, social attitudes will take time to change. In many families, women are still discouraged, or not permitted, to work, even if job information is readily available online. Many jobs also require women from smaller towns and villages to relocate to cities, a step that is far easier for men than for women. Educational qualification can also be a barrier for certain jobs. And even in households with mobile phones, the device is often controlled by the man in the house and not the woman.
Clearly, the biggest impediment to increasing women’s economic participation is social norms. In a heterogeneous country like India breaking these barriers will entail taking significant, coordinated efforts across multiple fronts, and in tandem rather than isolated measures.
This excerpt by Sanjeev Bikhchandani from ‘The Business of Business Is (Not) Just Business’, edited by Sutapa Banerjee, has been published with permission from HarperCollins Publishers India.