IT@TT - Online

N.Muralidharan, Managing Director and Vice President, JobStreet.com India shares with Amrita Ghosh of IT@TT, the nuances involving the process of e-recruitment and how it works in India. Some excerpts..

IT@TT: E-Recruitment seems to be the latest rage in corporate circles worldwide. Tell us a little how it works in India?

NM: The concepts of e-recruitment are pretty simple. Capture profiles of jobs and job seekers. Try to match them up so that the right job is matched with the right person. And because of numerous applications, provide ways of managing, tracking and ranking the applications, so recruiters don't waste time on finding the right candidate. Technology used includes database management, matching and evaluation algorithms, skill classifications, and of course, good user interface for companies to manage the resumes with least manual work.

In India, many job sites find it hard to scale up operations because, they fail to follow the true e-recruitment model as mentioned above. The Internet's advantage is speed, cost, reach, and most of all-scalability. These are lost once you get into doing the job of a placement consultant for companies.

In India we have clients such as HLL, TVS, Glaxo-Smithkline Beecham, Allergan, i2 Technologies and many more. These clients see value in our automated recruitment services, which deliver all the benefits of speed, cost, reach, and scalability. Our survey has shown that recruitment cycle can be reduced from 60 days to 7 days by using our online recruiting solutions.

IT@TT: What kind of recruitment solutions do you offer to job seekers and recruiters?

NM: Recruitment has three distinct stages: sourcing of candidates, processing, and finally evaluation and testing before hire. Today we provide services in all these levels, which are now benchmarks for other job sites to follow.

We also provide a facility for online job postings along with Intelligent Agents. This is a search and matching software that emails the right job to the right candidate. Our solutions help corporates integrate their other sources of resumes into the online system, thereby automating their entire recruiting function. Thus companies can use placement consultants, or newspaper ads-to get resumes as they always have been, and integrate them with our sourcing solution. This means that they take advantage of the speed, processing ability and automation that technology brings, into traditional ways of recruitment as well. We also manages corporate career pages on the website-from end-to-end-from job postings to database management and online testing.

Our research shows that in the traditional recruitment, corporates spend 4-5 weeks in sorting resumes into a short list of candidates after the advertisement has appeared. Together with the man hours spent, it becomes quite expensive. Our survey shows that on an average, corporates spend 60 days to fill positions from inception of need to fulfilment.

Our award-winning ASP Software, SiVA, compresses this time and resource needed for the enormous task of short listing within minutes. SiVA won the "Best Asp Software" award at AMPITTA 2001 for the Asia-Pacific region recently. And not without reason. SiVA includes online posting solutions, resume search engine, pre-screening wizard, online testing wizard, administration features for multi-location corporates, automatic communication tools for sending acknowledgement, interview, or reject letter at the click of a button, and features like the interview scheduler; all developed with close interaction with HR Managers from companies like Dell and Intel.

IT@TT: Jobstreet has been around for almost 6 years now. How have you fared? What about have competition?

NM: We are one of the earliest players on the small technology company scene. Set up in Penang, Malaysia in 1995, it originally catered to the human resource needs of companies in the Penang Free Trade Zone. That office is still the driver for the business. And is now a R&D house for the flagship Web-enabled product that allows companies to get instant alerts and updates when a potential job seeker files his resume online.

We've grown at a rate of 300% per year since inception. Today, we have over a million job seekers and 10,000 corporates who benefit from our online recruitment solutions. We are a P2P company. Our mission statement captures the essence of what we have set out to do. Of course exponential growth has its issues. Being a technology and Internet company has its advantages: you can scale with fewer numbers of people, or with fewer overheads being added-We are profitable in Philippines and Malaysia, and will be reaching break-even as an organization by next month.

IT@TT: What kind of jobs do you showcase?

NM: We look for a great variety of skill sets. Nestle is looking for a junior secretary while ITC posted a position for a finance manager recently. And TVS Suzuki wanted a VP business development. Since over 450 companies visit our site looking for people every month in India alone, we tried not to limit to IT alone. In fact, our strength lies in non-IT jobs.

IT@TT: With the US slowdown, what is the market scenario of jobs in India and abroad?

NM: Obviously with the slowdown, the requirements for the 'States have fallen. Not only have a lot of companies frozen recruitment, but layoffs have also happened. One Chennai-based software company recently laid off 50 software engineers. A prominent e-solutions company in Bangalore is laying off people from its 450 strong software development team.

This (situation) is bound to change sometime, may not be in the immediate future, but over a period of time. However, we have been relatively unaffected. We have got many non-IT clients who continue to recruit heavily even today. In fact, some of the areas like insurance and marketing have seen a resurgence in recent times.

Interviewed By Amrita Ghosh
[email protected]

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