I am a Technologist. I am a blogger. I am a kid (though not quite anymore :( ) growing up in the internet age. My niece will probably start typing on an iphone before she gets to the notebook. She will probably blog by the time she hits 4 (3 years, 12 months and 350 days from now), or maybe not. But she will be smart and tech-savvy and know how to get things easily and comfortably from the simple click of a mouse button.
I actually went a little too far in the future. The same story holds for my immediate juniors.
The fact that internet penetration has grown, and the web scene in India has really started to heat up, I still do not understand why job portals do not catch up with the trend. It’s not a new thing in the western countries. You can probably find tons of such, if you do a simple google search on job boards.
What is the feasibility of such a job board in India ?? Can we build a system which aims only at a specific vertical (say IT or Technology in general) and takes a different route to push the jobs to the seeker, rather than wait for the seeker to come across the opening. Why I say this is simply because I had the pleasure of hearing a talk of a marketing genius, where he said a few words like :
There are only two ways to market your product. Either you build a product that is so brilliant that it PULLS the customers; or you build a strategy to PUSH your product to the masses.
Now, traditional job boards have been here for a long time, and neither is there product any longer anywhere near to brilliant, nor are they building new products that are technologically more sound and meant for the coming generation (which is, by large, going to be very tech-savvy and very smart). The main revenue model for them now, is more or less, selling lakhs of resumes that they have collected over time to prospective employers. I can link to two such companies, that I personally know well, who had a rough time with these job portals…..here and here
Alternatively, these job portals also carry-on recruitment drives for larger companies, which are very indirect and lack any transparency. If I had to summarize, I would probably write down these negatives in these job portals :
- Lack of transparency – As a job-seeker, I am not kept in the loop, or probably a direct feedback is not available in most of the cases. I hate the fact that I cannot know as to what is the status of my application.
- What with the privacy policy and all these “New jobs matching your profile” or selling my resume ?? Was that mentioned anywhere that they will be selling my resumes, and I will be getting 10-15 spam mail daily to fill my ever-growing mailbox ??!!
- What happened to the job that I was actually looking for ?? It came and it went. It was not really pushed to me (remember unobtrusive ways only)
- For the employer – it’s more like spending enough money and not getting good resumes. Literally. I knew it in my college, that 99% of the population did not care to go to these job portals or submit their resumes. Or maybe, if and once out of desperation they did (and that too, with all the pain of filling up those lengthy forms, which is also one of the major problems) signup for the service, they never looked back to it. Which obviously, brings in the quality concern.
- The number of resumes maybe high, but as an employer, I need people who are currently actively looking for jobs. It’s like saying the same thing as any desi social networking site would – we have the numbers, but not the active ones.
I could probably go on blabbering about these job portals, and how they are really not upto the mark, for a country like India, where IT has become the second religion (after cricket obviously), but I am looking for some feedback on this first.
- Do you really thing job boards can change the system ??
- And maybe we can go a step ahead of traditional job boards and have a much better system in terms of ROI for both, the employer as well as the seeker (the I in ROI here can be anything, not just monetary value…take for example time for both of the parties to reach their goals) ??
- How can we really push the job openings to the right seeker and at the right time ?? Blogosphere, an advanced job-board-ad system ??
- How to pull the seeker instantly after pushing the job opening to him ?? Technically yes it’s possible. But how otherwise ??
- How to enable transparency for the seeker ?? Should the job board act as an intermediary, or just a third person watching from the sidelines (but with enough power to moderate any talk between the employer and the employee) ??
I know some of these questions might sound vague. But to a young mind, with ample energy, nothing seems to be trivial :)
It’s like a new baby has born inside me :)
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Hi!
My name is Jessika!