Re-Hiring Ex-Employees?

IN ORDER TO CONTROL ATTRITION, ORGANISATIONS TODAY ARE RE-HIRING THEIR EX-EMPLOYEES WHO HAD QUIT THEIR JOBS ON A PLEASANT NOTE. YASMIN TAJ EXPLAINS WHY THIS TREND IS GAINING IMMENSE POPULARITY IN TODAY’S CORPORATE CONTEXT

   Back then, it seemed like the perfect opportunity, the perfect job offer. This job was what you always needed to fulfil your dream of being what you aspired to be. You quit your present job and jumped at the opportunity of moving into a new arena. But then, you realise that this new job is nothing like what you had imagined. You are stuck! And your previous job and organisation now seem like heaven. What do you do now? Stick around and hope for something good to happen since there is no probability of going back on the road you had left much behind? Hang on and don’t lose hope since many organisations today are adopting the policy of rehiring ex-employees. Conventionally, re-hiring was an unacceptable practice. But these days, organisations are open to taking back those employees who had quit their jobs in order to move towards greener pastures.
   
SECOND    INNINGS

“We believe ‘second innings’ is a good thing for both the organisation and the employee because both know what to expect out of each other,” says B Ramaswamy, Head, Human Capital, Feedback Ventures which has started a
‘re-hiring’ policy. “We, too, welcome and hire exemployees and have broad guidelines. An employee wants to come back because the previous organisation is always a known territory and has a certain comfort level associated with it,” says Chandan Chattaraj, Executive Director, HR, Xerox India Limited. Amitabh Das Mundhra, Director, Simplex Infrastructures Limited puts forth his view, “Re-hiring is not a bad policy and in our organisation, we welcome our ex-employees, if they are willing to work with us again. Such employees leave because either they are dissatisfied with the current job profile or they feel the need to explore other career growth prospects. But then, at some point of time, they choose to come back.”
   
BOOMERANGING    WORK

Recruitment experts identify such employees as, ‘boomerangs’ and they also confirm that this phenomenon is a smart recruitment strategy. “The organisation encourages ex-employees who had voluntarily left to rejoin another organisation and not those who had been terminated. Mostly, the employees who seek to return are those who had left some windows open for the company to observe them in their role outside. The selection process for the ex-employee will be the same as for any new recruit,” informs Ramaswamy. So what does a ‘boomerang’ bring into the organisation? “Often re-hires have gained in experience, wisdom and maturity and are equipped with better abilities to perform and be more productive at work than before,” says Ramaswamy. Chattaraj claims, “Re-hiring helps the organisation cut down training costs, brings down the productivity lost due to time taken by a new hire to start producing results, enhances employer branding, ensures better fit – clarity on both sides – employer as well as employee and brings diverse experience to the organisation.”
   
BACK WITH    A BANG

We cannot deny the fact that re-hiring is an intelligent practice and many organisations have opened their doors to ex-employees in the recent times. But then what is the
guarantee that the employee will not repeat the same mistake and quit? According to Ramaswamy, “When we re-hire an old employee, the ‘second innings’ is definitely likely to be longer, hopefully till ‘retirement do us part’! Usually the organisation and the re-hired employees communicate with each other more openly than earlier.” For Chattaraj, “A re-hire already knows an organisation; therefore, there aren’t any culture shocks involved. An exemployee has already ventured in the job market and worked in other organisations. In case he/she is ready to rejoin an organisation, it clearly means that he/she rates the organisation better than other organisation and chances of quitting again are low.” Mundhra adds, “A habitual quitter can always be identified. Organisations need to find out whether the reason for quitting in the first instance was a genuine reason or not.”
   The booming trend of hiring ‘boomerangs’ is sure to catch on. This only proves that not always are the doors of destiny shut forever and there is always a second chance! 

- yasmin.taj@timesgroup.com

TCS best employer, Wipro nowhere among Top 20

CHENNAI: Tata Consultancy Services retained its top position as the best IT employer in India, while software major Wipro figured nowhere among the ‘Top 20’ list, as per a survey by industry analysts.

While HCL Infosystems, iGate, RMSI and Synechron occupied the next four slots after TCS, Infosys slipped four places to the eight position, according to an annual survey done by Cybermedia’s flagship publication Dataquest in collaboration with IDC India.

The seventh annual Dataquest-IDC survey was participated by 2,844 software, hardware and marketing professionals from 33 IT companies, totally employing 3,04,834 people in seven cities.

The rating of employers was done upon the basis of employee satisfaction and HR scores.

IBM was rated the sixth best employer, followed by Capgemini, Infosys, Tavant Technologies and Sun Microsystems.

According to the survey, TCS, with a large workforce based in foreign shores, followed innovative HR practices and maintained ethos across geographies to achieve consistency in workforce.

The employees of HCL Infosystems were found to be satisfied with the growth opportunities, job security and relationship with peers in the company.

According to Pradeep Gupta, publisher of Cybermedia, multinational employers IBM, Capgemini, Sun Microsystems and CSC have mastered the art of managing Indian employees to rank among the Top 20 best IT employers in the country.

“Others, especially many India-based IT employers, need to balance aggressive recruitment with the warmth and personal touch…to retain people as they ramp up headcount”.

Strong Rupee slows down Hiring in IT.

The dollar’s roller-coaster ride — down 14 percent in the last 12 months even as the rupee appreciated 7 percent — is giving jitters to Indian IT/ITES firms.

Many of them have reported lower margins last quarter, while their costs have moved north. The fallout: Many of them have resorted to cutting costs to save margins.

Now, it’s affecting their HR departments as well. Many IT firms have cut down their bench strength, while others are going slow on hiring plans. Some are avoiding lateral hiring, or even if they do, it’s completely need-based — they are keeping it to the minimum.

IT recruiters confirm that bench strength in some IT companies has reduced by almost 20-25 percent. “There is lot of focus on 100 percent utilisation of resources to save cost. Almost all major IT companies are cutting down bench strength,” confirms Nishu Miglani, general manager, IT, Manpower India.

At Cognizant for example, the focus has been on increasing employee utilisation levels by two percentage points, from 61 percent to 63 percent in the second quarter of the year. “Every 1 percent appreciation of the rupee negatively impacts our operating margins by around 20 basis points. The appreciation of the rupee versus the dollar in the second quarter of 2007 impacted our operating margin by around 150 basis points,” informs Bhaskar Das, V-P, human resources, Cognizant.

At Infogain Corporation, bench strength has been brought down from 15 percent to 10 percent. “Most of our clients are US-based, so we are facing a lot of pressure. We had to take certain steps to save our margins,” says Pankaj Shankar, global HR head, Infogain.

-Sujata Dutta Sachdeva, New Delhi
The Times of India

FAKE CVS: ENTRY BLOCKED

A growing number of fake CVs have been plaguing the IT and ITeS sector in the last couple of years. However, with a few high profile companies like Wipro and Satyam taking strict action, which made headlines and others going in for stern verification procedures, the incidence is coming down, of late.

Wipro last year had fired over 50 employees for faking their resumes and filed police complaints against several recruitment agencies for helping these employees provide false CV information. Hyderabad-based Satyam Computers terminated the services of at least 500 people in 2006 because of fudged documents. Other IT companies, which have been quietly terminating employees who were found to have fabricated their backgrounds include IBM India, Infosys and TCS.

HR professionals point out that candidates providing false information about themselves constitute around 10 percent in some companies, many others claim they have seen no such cases. While consultants feel that about 4-5 percent of the thousands of candidates who approach them to be placed have fake CVs, they add that the incidence has declined by about 15-20 percent in the last few months.

As Ajit Isaac, CEO, Adecco India, puts it, “awareness about the issue is high now, hence the barrier of candidates to put fake CVs has gone up. Also, the tolerance level for such things has gone down among companies and agencies. So, the number of incidence has gone down too.”

Nirupama VG, founder of Ad Astra Consultants, says the number is coming down with respect to the fudging of documents on educational qualifications. However, she added that the fudging has taken a new avatar. Candidates are now stating wrong experience qualifications in their resumes. “For instance, they say they worked for a certain company and it closed down. Even reference companies can’t always check up on this,’’ she explains.

Another way candidates are faking their CVs nowadays is by saying that some part of the compensation was paid out of the payroll, and then demand higher salaries from the prospective company.

-Thanuja B M
The Economic Times (Bangalore edition)

IT Companies Create Shadow talent Pool

With no slack in the job-hopping proclivities of technology professionals, companies are adopting a practice that some call “shadow hunting” to preempt any workflow discontinuity due to attrition.This involves mandating headhunters to identify and maintain a “warm talent shadow” outside their organisations to ensure ready availability of talent as and when the need arises.“Attrition happens right from pre-induction level. Techies are casual about hopping jobs, as jobs are aplenty in the market. So companies are forced to take additional measures to ensure quick replacements,” says T Arvind Krishna, HR head of an IT firm.

This trend is unique to India, says Nirupama V G, managing director of HR consultancy AdAstra. “Almost every employee has two or more job offers. In the past few months, we have seen many more companies asking for shadow arrangements. Consultants are asked to keep this ready-to-hire shadow warm, through occasional phone calls, short messages or e-mails,” she says.

Shrabani Basu, HR consultant and corporate trainer, says employers are on tenterhooks about employees quitting. Every single recruitment needs a couple of months, between identifying to actual staffing. “Time is business, and business means money. So tech firms are looking at buffer arrangements,” Basu says.

Mini Joseph Tejaswi, Bangalore

Is Recruiting a Profession by Kevin Wheeler

Taking out myth from all the people starting their profession in HR, let us all be very clear that recruitment is not an entry level job to get into the HR generalist role………Recruitments has its own significanceImproving the fragile relationship between HR, hiring managers, and recruitersMany people do not regard recruiting as a profession. HR generalists are prone to think that anyone can do recruiting. Managers expect unqualified people to act as interviewers and to give them advice on whom to hire. Even recruiters have mixed opinions, as many of them were not formally trained and were also HR generalists at some point.

Within many organizations, there is an uneasy relationship between human resources generalists, recruiters, and management. HR generalists often try to intermediate among everyone, sometimes creating confusion or generating animosity. Recruiters tend to work alone or to bypass the HR generalist, also creating bad feelings. Managers go to whichever one they have the best relationship with.

In some organizations, hiring managers simply bypass both and go directly to third-party recruiters outside the firm. They do this because these agency recruiters are seen as professionals. They meet three requirements: they are perceived as experts who have access to the right candidates, they are able to immediately respond to the hiring manager’s needs, and they are free of corporate politics and bureaucracy.

While this problem has existed for decades and is probably a normal part of corporate life, it can be different. Part of the problem is that HR is in the midst of changing from being administrative and transaction-centered to being value-centered.

HRIS systems have automated many of the administrative tasks of HR, and intranets and self-service philosophies have taken over some of their service elements. This has led to a need for fewer people within most HR functions and to an identity crisis for HR professionals who now have to re-establish a value-adding role for themselves. Many people see recruiting, or finding the right talent, as one of these and want to be part of the process.

Recruiters are faced with daunting challenges as well. They can no longer rely on volume to meet demands. For some positions, few people, if any, apply. For others, there are hundreds of applicants. The recruiter has to source people for the tough positions and screen them for the others. And they have to do the screening and assessing in a deeper manner than before and are held to tighter quality standards.

To be successful, they too have had to adopt technology that removes much of the clerical side of their work. They find that it is critical to know who the best performers are and what their competencies and skills are. Yet the HR professional often won’t facilitate an interaction or can’t identify the best performers and throw up procedural blocks to prevent recruiters from doing it themselves.

Hiring managers don’t care about any of this. They just want good people fast. Because the HR professionals most often have the relationship with the hiring manager, they should be able to act as a broker between the hiring manager and the recruiter. Yet the two often work at odds to one another. Many HR people feel threatened by their own systems and by the recruiting technologies and easily fall back into their more familiar administrative roles of regulator and police.

Professionals usually have some set of established qualifications that give them the right to call themselves professionals. HR has struggled to formulate these criteria and has done so with the Society of Human Resource Management’s Professional Human Resources and Senior Profession Human Resources certificates.

No one has done this yet for recruiting, although there has been talk among groups such as the old Employment Management Association (now part of SHRM) and other such groups to create standards. Until some organization creates the standards, recruiters need to self-regulate. They need to formally learn skills such as how to conduct a behavioral interview, how to recruit ethically, and how to use the Internet and other tools to source candidates. They need to have formal training in the laws of their state and government. Recruiting is getting more difficult and more complex every year.

Flying by the seat of their pants is rapidly becoming a liability to both the recruiter and the organization who hires them. Until such standards are defined, here are five things to improve the fragile, difficult relationship between HR, hiring managers, and recruiters:

1. Be responsive. Hiring managers want (and should get) attention and focus on the positions they have open. The HR professional is in the perfect position to facilitate the communication process between hiring managers and recruiters. In one organization, the HR professional acted as a team leader for a group composed of hiring managers, recruiters and a few technical experts. Together they identified competencies, developed interview guides and even made referrals.

2. Educate. Make sure that hiring managers understand the market and appreciate how easy or difficult a particular placement may be. Agencies do this by negotiation and price. Internally, HR professionals and recruiters have to do more explaining. Recruiters need to know and explain the talent marketplace. The HR professional needs to facilitate and broker relationships, gather and share information about people and make sure that the talent of the organization is “managed” in a way that maximizes productivity and minimizes turnover. 3. Reduce bureaucracy, employ technology. Make sure that the recruiting process is clearly understood by all the parties involved. Be sure that roles and responsibilities are well defined. Whenever possible, develop a service level agreement to actually spell out what each party will do (or not do) and when they will do it. Remove administrative responsibilities from the hiring manager and from recruiters and HR professionals by employing technology more effectively. Make sure whatever you want a manager to do with technology works flawlessly, quicker than it did before, and yields better quality. Would you use an ATM if it were twice as complicated and took more time than to go inside to the teller?

4. Measure what you do. Just because the HR professionals and the recruiters have taught the hiring managers about the market or redesigned roles does not mean that they all understand the impact those changes have. Both HR professionals and recruiters need to gather data, test hypotheses, establish metrics and make the recruiting process as empirical as possible. Managers will understand and respond to hard data. Show them the cost and time saved and the value added.

5. Use an evolutionary approach. Take things one step at a time. Don’t expect hiring managers to become recruiters, at least not right away. Don’t expect HR professionals to give up all their recruiting tasks. Those tasks will eventually disappear anyway. Don’t expect recruiters to become completely versed in all the rules and politics of the organization. Make people want to use the new approaches because they are faster, better, or cheaper. Remember to start by giving hiring managers what they want and need: good talent as fast as possible.

None of this is rocket science, just some very basic things that are often overlooked. Change is difficult for both HR and line management, so guide and teach managers about how to recruit while you continuously figure out how you can support their efforts from a behind-the-scenes, value-added approach.

Finally, lobby to get a set of professional standards in place so that you can truly say you are a professional and not just an amateur subset of HR.

Wipro buys Infocrossing in largest overseas acquisition

 

Continuing with its ‘string of pearls’ strategy, India’s third largest software exporter Wipro Technologies on Monday acquired Infocrossing, a US technology services company, valued at $600 million. This is the largest overseas acquisition in terms of market value. Wipro paid $18.70 per share in an all-cash deal. On hearing the acquisition news, Wipro shares closed at Rs. 457.85, 12.4 points lower to the previous close of Rs. 470.25, which happened to be their lowest close over a year.

Infocrossing has revenues of $232.4 million for the 12 months ended March 31, and the company provides infrastructure management solutions, including server management, mainframe outsourcing, network management and security services, Wipro said.“With its platform based solutions, Infocrossing also brings in significant expertise in health plan and payer management segments,” said Sudip Banerjee, president of enterprise solutions of Wipro Technologies.According to sources in Wipro, the special team that was formed last year to go after deals and contracts in excess of $50 million was instrumental in bagging this deal. Before this deal, Wipro has spent $388 million in acquiring 23 companies and by far, is the most active firm in this segment. According to industry observers, acquisition in the healthcare segment is one of the areas that the company was looking to fill and this acquisition fits that gap. “With this acquisition, Wipro has a more diverse portfolio to offer from financial services to chip-design.

Rival and competitor Infosys Technologies, bought out three BPO units of consumer electronics major Philips a fortnight back for $27 million.

-Venkatesh Ganesh, Hindustan Times

The Pretenders

People who oversell themselves belong in two places: Bollywood movies and reality TV shows. There is no room for them in the modern workplace, HR managers tell Viren Naidu
   We’ve all seen hoardings of brands endorsing weight-loss techniques that read something like, ‘Lose up to five kilos a week without diet or exercise’. In all probability, the hoarding will also have a blown-up picture of an unrealistically skinny model pouting disdainfully at onlookers. And though we all know that there is no easy way to lose weight, we are ready to believe at least some of the exaggerated promises the ad makes.

   Overselling is the first rule of advertising. Any brand requires aggressive promotion, be it a product brand, employer brand or employee brand. These days, the ‘employer’ brand is being hard-sold in the job market, which is ready to throw money at anyone who has the right skills. But if you thought it was that easy to pretend to be better than you are, think again…HR managers too are doing their homework!

OVER-RATED…

HR managers confess to frequently
   encountering candidates who try to impress them by claiming to be God’s gift to organisations. This is overselling at its worst. Renuka Krishna, VP-Talent Search and Recruitment, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd., has a memorable story to narrate: “We had this occasion once when we were recruiting for a rather difficult position in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) department. After searching various databases and sifting through many short-listed applications, we came across one candidate who we thought was a perfect fit. We carried out a few rounds of telephonic interviews (since he was an outstation candidate) and were highly impressed by his credentials. However, standard protocol followed at KPIT Cummins calls for a face-to-face interaction. Hence, we arranged for a video-conference and during the course of the interaction, we realised that he wasn’t half as impressive as he seemed during the telephonic interview. It was then that we realised that he was not the person we had talked to earlier – the candidate had tried to fool us by making us speak with someone else!”
   The above instance is just one of the many doing the rounds. Atul Srivastava, Senior VP and Head, Corporate HRD, Datamatics says, “We have had instances where they say that they know various forms of technology much
beyond their grasp. Many a time, the candidate is nodding or responding in monosyllables (yes or no) to direct questions like ‘have you worked on EJB or Struts?’ Further questioning often bares the truth.” Experts say that with the entry of MNCs and increasing competition, there are many opportunities floating in the job market. The market itself has become a job-seekers’ market. “Hence, companies offering employment also tend to package their offerings in a manner that excite jobseekers. In a quest for fast growth, both professional and monetary, job-seekers too tend to oversell themselves by exaggerating their achievements. Also, when it comes to highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, job-aspirants tend to disguise their positive traits as weaknesses in order to impress the interviewer,” says Rajiv Phadke, Executive Director-HR and Business Development, Angel Broking. Krishna makes an attempt to understand what it is that drives such candidates to oversell themselves, “People are keen on getting high paying jobs and senior titles, early in their careers. They are young and ambitious; but lack the experience and perseverance required of the position and command higher remuneration. It is a highly competitive environment where supply far exceeds demand and plush jobs are far and few between. Hence, they are under pressure to put their best foot forward. Add to this peer pressure and a desire to bag the best offers amongst other batch mates.” “Any method we devise is not entirely fool-proof. But, candidates cannot fool experienced professionals who stay one or two steps ahead. As part of a closeknit community of HR professionals, word spreads fast and we keep ourselves abreast with such instances,” states Srivastava.

OVER-ESTIMATED…

Iti Kumar, Director-HR, GlobalLogic shares an incident that could be an eye-opener for several recruiting managers, “In one case, a desperate candidate began overselling herself by using a lot of jargon and even threw around names of big employers whom she has been associated with in the past. The excess overselling that she demonstrated made us cautious and when a reference check was conducted, it was found that she never worked with those companies and her claims of being an experienced professional were a big hoax.” Nina Woodard, Director-Business Development, SHRM India, too, recalls a funny incident that happened in India a few years ago, during the interview process. Woodard interviewed two candidates who were back then, working for the same employer and with each other as colleagues. Both of them gave her the exact same story about their accomplishments in the current organisation and both indicated that they had been the key person responsible for the success of the project they described. They were, of course, completely unaware of the fact that Woodard had interviewed them both. She finally used a variety of behavioural interviewing techniques to get to the fact of the matter and settle who was lying and who wasn’t once and for all!

OVER-EXAGGERATED…

Vivek Govilkar, Senior Vice President HR and Training, i-flex Solutions suggests a way in which one can try to combat this trend, “When a candidate tries to talk about their achievements, ask the person for achievements which are quantifiable and verifiable. There are always chances of a candidate making generalised statements like, “I was the architect of the company’s sales strategy.” If so, ask him/her how his/her contribution has helped boost the sales of the company.” Kumar enlists a few ways on how you can distinguish an overselling candidate from a genuine one: Interviewer should ask a logical series of questions that can help the interviewer gauge the knowledge quotient of the candidate. The HR manager should ask the candidate to submit the proof or establish the proof for whatever he/she is claiming. When asked about his/her weaknesses, a genuine candidate would sincerely point them out and also tell what he/she is doing to overcome it unlike an overselling candidate.
So is overselling bad? Experts say that it all depends in what context the term is actually used. If it is used to sell a washing powder, the consequences can be reparable but if it is used to sell medication to an ailing patient, the consequences can be fatal. In the corporate context though, the trend will be short lived. As HR experts say, “Eventually, we will find out!”
viren.naidu@timesgroup.com

TimesJobs Claims No.1 Is it True?

 

The battle for the number one position in online recruitment classifieds market has taken a new turn. TimesJobs.com has taken out an advertisement saying “Everyone is quitting naukri”, probably a pun-intended campaign against Naukri.com. TimesJobs claimed 3.075 million resumes which are 0-6 months old, while it said the the nearest rival (read Naukri) has only 2.73 million active resumes.
In a page one article (a plug job for the group company) in The Economic Times, TimesJobs.com has claimed that it is the number one jobs site with 150 million page views a month, while the nearest competitor has only 120 million page views a month. The article quotes Vineet Jain, MD of the Times Group: “We just put our heads down and worked hard. A smartly differentiated product, backed by a great team, cutting edge technology and superb communication did the trick for TimesJobs.com. Our understanding of new media helped us cracking the market in less than three years.”
Now the battle for number one position is being hijacked by TimesJobs. It used to be Naukri versus Monster India earlier. Sanjeev Bikhchandani, MD of Info Edge Ltd, the owner of Naukri.com, could not be reached for comments. However, our sources suggest that Naukri is “reviewing the matter, and will come out with a response in a few days time”. A rival of TimesJobs told ContentSutra that the company has encouraged duplication of resumes.
What are the options for Naukri now: It can either come up with its own campaign with their own set of numbers to counter TimesJobs claim. Or Naukri can take TimesJobs to court for using the phrase “Everyone is quitting naukri”. An industry source told ContentSutra: “The latter option is a possibility but may not be the smartest option, though.” So it’s likely Naukri will come up with a counter campaign. Watch this space.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, MD of Naukri.com, responds:
1. As per Alexa and Comscore, Naukri remains by far the leading job site in India. On Alexa the three month reach of Naukri at 855 today is thrice that of TimesJobs which is at 257. According to Comscore, Naukri got more than 2.3 million unique users in February as compared to slightly more than 1.3 million of Timesjobs.
2. In fact, as per Alexa, TimesJobs has slipped to fourth place behind Clickjobs.
3. The statistic that TimesJobs is referring to is “Active” resumes in the last six months, not total resumes. Here TimesJobs has a different definition of “Active” as compared to Naukri. In TimesJobs, if you open a job alert email and click on a job in the email to go to the site you are treated as an active user. In Naukri, you are an active user only if you update your CV or apply for a job or are a new registrant. We do not count clicking on a job in a job alert as being “Active”. 
4. Finally, TimesJobs is encouraging people to register more than once on their site.

Update: Alexa is not the best of the measurement tool. However, it’s the most popular. See a check done by us below. Naukri is far ahead in page views. And what is also surprising is ClickJobs.com (of BharatMatrimony group) has shot into the top league.

 -Sahad PV

How Naukri.com became a hit

Luck. It’s a thought that keeps coming back while hearing the story of how Sanjeev Bikhchandani built Naukri.com into the country’s largest web-based employment site, ahead of even Monster.com’s India offering which got stronger when it took over JobsAhead.com or print-giant Times of India’s employment site. Or is it that entrepreneurs like Bikhchandani recognise opportunity while the rest of think it’s just happenstance.
We’re at the recently-opened Piccadelhi in Connaught Place’s Plaza cinema complex, styled to resemble the London locale right down to the park-style benches and bus in the middle of the restaurant and doormen with the red coats and bearskin hats made famous by the Buckingham Palace guards, but it’s too noisy to hear a long story which Bikhchandani is primed to tell.

So we walk down to DV8, which is what that the 1970s hangout disco, the Cellar (which later became El Arab) has now morphed into. Lunch is quickly ordered. No booze since neither of us can down two in the afternoon without feeling groggy; it’s a very hot chicken goulash soup with some crispy veggies for starters and grilled fish for both of us.

Bikhchandani’s story, or the salient parts of it, are, of course, pretty well-known by now since parts have appeared in various newspapers including this one as well as in a case study prepared by a professor at the IIM Ahmedabad. For the record, Bikhchandani quit a lucrative management job at Glaxo Smithkline (where he earned “Rs 8,000 a month with prospects”) to start off his own jobs venture since he saw colleagues queuing up all the time to look at the appointments section of Business India magazine – “you’re always looking at a job, even when you’re not looking for one”.

He started off his company doing the odd market surveys and feasibility report, but the company was too broke to pay him, so the house was looked after by his wife who worked with Nestle. He taught management over weekends at various places like the Times School of Marketing, management school IMT and at the IMS coaching classes – to earn around Rs 2,000 a month, “enough for booze and cigarettes since I didn’t want to be a fully-kept man”, he says with the practiced air of a well-told story.

In between, for four years, he got a job as a consulting editor of The Pioneer and ran their careers supplements, something made possible through chance meetings with the editor Chandan Mitra – later, as Chandan bought the paper, Bikhchandani helped him restructure operations to cut costs.

In 1990, or thereabouts, the department of telecom came out with ads launching a video text service and wanted content providers. Bikhchandani got staffers to reword job ads from various newspapers to create a jobs database – a lawyer told him there were no IPR issues as long as the words were different! – and had a readymade database.

However, the DoT project never took off. In 1996, at a visit to IT Asia at Pragati Maidan, Bikhchandani saw a stall with a “www” sign and got his first exposure to the net and what it could do. The forgotten database suddenly looked useful, so staffers began combing 29 newspapers to build it up – the recession of the mid-1990s, in any case, resulted in staffers having nothing to do. His brother was given a 5 per cent stake in Naukri for offering to pay $25 a month to a web-hosting firm, the “best programmer in the world”.

Anil Lall was given 8-9 per cent for learning net-programming and doing it, and another friend V N Saroja was given 9 per cent for running the company. ‘By now I’d given away around a fourth of the company, but a fourth of zero is still zero!’

The model worked, and while VCs began calling, Bikhchandani turned them down, till in 2000, JobsAhead launched and advertised in the Sharjah cricket tournament with an ad budget greater than Naukri’s turnover. Naukri gave ICICI Ventures 15 per cent for Rs 7.3 crore (rs 73 million), just before the dotcom bust. Last year’s turnover at Naukri, all from fresh ads (not from rewording of print ads!), was Rs 45 crore (Rs 450 million) with a profit of Rs 8.4 crore (Rs 84 million).

What’s the way forward? Sure, running a company of 775 people across 30 offices is a nightmare, but how is Google’s Googlebase or Yahoo! Hotjobs affecting Naukri?

Bikhchandani’s now thinking smart, and you realise his success has a lot less to do with luck. He will, he says, put out all his 80,000 job ads on aggregators such as Google and Yahoo! (this will give his clients a larger response level). Isn’t Naukri dead then? Not really, he argues, since his search algorithm will be a lot more robust than the “single box searches of the US”.

Once you aggregate various databases, like Google will do, you can’t do searches with very detailed criterion – like a job in Delhi in a FMCG firm as a general manager for someone with over nine years of experience, for instance. In the last year itself, Naukri’s changed its search algorithm 20 times to take into account changing needs of the client base.

Bikhchandani’s on a roll now, with strategic advice coming forth faster than I can handle. Business Standard, he says, should have a separate desk for its web edition, reword the news got from various agencies like PTI and Reuters (basically, once you put out 50-100 stories an hour, you get huge traffic) and run Google ads along the side to get revenue.

He says the media war in Mumbai needs to be re-targetted and newcomers like Hindustan Times and DNA (along with others like Mid-Day and The Indian Express) need to offer combined ads to clients since this will equal the Times of India’s reach (his Lintas days recall that clients pay for reach first, and worry about costs later) and will force the Times to lower ad tariffs and so hit its ability to take on the market so aggressively – better to target the Times’ market he says than to compete for just the non-Times segment!

We wind up with Bikhchandani saying he admires the Google Consumer Surplus model. Groping into the past, I vaguely recall Consumer Surplus is the extra you’d have been willing to pay for something, but how’s Google getting this? By getting advertisers to bid for keyword searches – if a florist pays for a keyword, everytime someone searches for flowers, this florists’ name comes up first. I leave a bit groggy, not quite sure how this fits into Naukri’s business model. It does though, I’m sure.
-Sunil Jain