If you live in India, you couldn’t have missed the slugfest between Timesjobs & Naukri currently playing in the newspapers, national television & local radio. While that battle (actually just a media blitzkrieg, for Timesjob’s claims are hopelessly presumptuous) is for the ‘quantity’ dimension in the recruitment wars on Indian soil, there is another front that has been opened to address its ‘quality’ dimension. And this comes straight out of American shores. For, Joel Spolsky (who doesn’t know him) has just launched a dedicated jobboard for Indian tech professionals. JoelonSoftware is easily one of the most popular tech blogs and it gets serious eyeballs from gifted coders & serious hackers. Why am I writing about this seemingly trivial happening? Well, I think Joel has done something quite remarkable; sitting in New York, he has diagnosed a critical problem afflicting technology recruitments in India and is trying to monetize this opportunity. I think this is going to grow into a trend, wherein the blogosphere plays a crucial role in recruiting key tech personnel.
Tech recruitments are tough for all. The big Indian services companies (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Accenture, IBM) which are hiring armies of engineers every year, tackle this issue by having a big corporate recruitment department, with a sizable budget at its disposal. Smaller companies use a combination of recruitment methods, with online job portals being an important part of mix. I have myself used naukri.com frequently and while we were able to hire some engineers initially, Naukri has now outgrown its utility and is of little use. Its ‘signal to noise ratio’ is completely hopeless and searching for good employees is like searching for a needle in the haystack. In fact, the very medium (of job portals) has started acting as a self defeating filter with the most talented people simply not being present there, or are oblivious to these portals.
My own startup must be amongst the early Indian adopters of overseas blogcentric jobboards. Sometime in the middle of last year, we had advertised on the 37Signals jobboard for hiring developers in New Delhi. It cost us 200$ (which incidentally is quite a bit, specially for a small company). The ads resulted in a small bunch of seriously good developers applying to us; while we did not end up hiring anybody from that lot, we still think it was worth the effort. To build world class software, you need world class developers and if the ads are expensive, so be it. (since then, I have received quite a few emails from people contemplating similar ads and wanting to know about our experience).
Clichéd as it may sound, GOOD PEOPLE CAN MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. And as Fred Brooks wrote in ‘The Mythical Man Months’, his all time classic on software project mgmt, the unitary principles do not apply to software development (specially for product companies). Having experienced this personally, I reflected on this issue earlier in this post on my personal blog ‘Nine women cannot deliver a baby in one month’. Here’s a quotation from the book that will explain this best – “..what is of immense relevance to smaller software teams, is an obvious implication of the Brooks’ Law i.e. it will be more productive to employ a smaller number of very talented programmers on a project than to employ a larger number of less talented programmers, since individual programmer productivity can vary by a factor of ten between highly talented and efficient programmers and less talented programmers….â€
So if you are a Indian technology company looking to recruit the best developers, managers etc, give the following jobboards a serious thought. All these jobboards are hosted on very high traffic & globally popular blogs. And a sizable chunk of their readerships is from Indians, either in India or abroad, with many of them (to use another cliché) being the ‘alpha amongst their species’. Thus the blogs will behave as an automatic filter and ensure that you get a small but meaningful set of resumes to act upon.
You’d need to pay 50$ per post and can pay by credit card. Good for developers, coders, engineers etc.
It costs 200$; this could work if you are looking for engineers, marketing folks, startup founders etc.
This will set you back by $300; good for developers, designers etc
This costs $200 per post; give Gigaom’s focus, this would make sense for telecom professionals.
And that’s not all, you now also have jobboards on Indian blogs like ContentSutra, Alootechie, Watblog.
The job board was launched quite sometime back (Mar 25ish) and there are very very few ads.
Why doesn’t Webyantra do the same 😉 .
On the other hand ill agree with PoV on naukri and its likes , if you post a resume there u are guaranteed to get SPAMd , and i believe most decently good people never actually never need to do so.
On the other hand being a recruiter and going though all those resumes, taking interviews and still finding no one is precious time wasted.
This targeted approach is any day better , as most passionate s/w professionals keep themself updated and on the other hand people who just work for money and have no interest post on Naukri :).
I am surprised why the big recruiting companies don’t get it. Every company gives its employees a referral bonus for hiring. And yet – these guys go build a mass market crap of resume databases. I personally like the jobster (www.jobster.com) model. Its way more efficient, personal and likely to yield high-quality candidates.
Arun,
Thats the entire point; only few people will advertise there and a few people will search for jobs there…
amit
Errrr, I have a question :
If the Big companies like InfoSys, Wipro, etc. hire through their own HR teams, and the small firms cannot afford Naukri/Monster, then WHO exactly uses their services??? I mean, these guys, DO make money, right? So, who are their clients?
Cheers,
R
Rohitesh,
I wasn’t at all suggesting that small firms cannot afford naukri/monster; these sites are very affordable.
Problem is that of unrelevant resumes that get sent in response to each ad. If I put out an ad on naukri today, I think within the next week, I will get at least 5000 resumes, 99% of which are irrelevant. the problem is the effort, that is needed to sort out the 1% relevant ones.
amit
I don’t think it’s true to say that an ad on naukri will return 99% irrelevant resumes. That’s just plain incorrect.
You need the consider the type of job that is being advertised. As with any form of open market some ads will yield more and better results than others.
Based on our recent research the average employer posting a job on naukri is happy with quantity and more importantly quality of applicants received.
Having said this, an employer may have better results sourcing a web 2.0 technical director with Silicon valley experience by advertising on the 37signals job board, but that’s just the nature of the business and free market economies.
To make a general comment that 99% of Naukri applicants are irrelevant is just plain incorrect.
maneck mohan – http://www.recruit.net
How do you guarantee that only or most of the “quality” applications will be recieved using this medium??
Not many programmers frequent the same kind of sites that enterpreneurs and business professionals do. If this site had a job board – I think it would be best suited for those looking for sales/marketing folks more so than developers.
There are not many positions on joelonsoftware – but as it’s about quality not quantity, that’s all that really matters!
Small and powerful teams rule large, mediocre ones!
Very insightful article. It seems more true now than ever that ‘quality’ (like in many other areas) more than ‘quantity’ is the need of the hour. Great article, would definitely follow this blog …
share your view.. personally, I think Linked.com approach is good, its personal and community driving. i suggest nakuri to explore similar options.
another options,.. big companies should move away from tier-1,2 university. that will creating more loyal employee base. (example: a person from IIT is most likely to quit infosys with-in couple of year for MBA then say BE from some southern India private college). anyways, India IT companies are spending more in training then their international counterparts. I hope they are using their HR database for some analysis.
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Nice Article.Even I was also not aware about this initiative of Joel.But it does not seem too active at the moment.
As compared to all the other Job Blogs, we are offering Postings for FREE as of now and our subscriber base is also not that bad.
Happy Job Hunting !!
What are the quality engineers really looking for when they seek employment?
Anyone tried nvest free money into real estate property?
I guess investment into real estate worldwide can be the best investment in your life. Real estate is good because it is like gold.
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novatech bangalore is a fraud e recruitment agency.it takes money from you for recruitment abroad and then just lies lies
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There is no doubt that hiring employees is a very difficult process. As you correctly pointed out, the signal to noise ratio is very bad. In fact, the problem, I dont think lies with these job portals. We have had similar experience with yournextleap.com. But building a checklist process might be a good idea. There are still job boards that need to come up for marketing, finance professionals.
good part time jobs