Ambrish Raghuvanshi

A software developer looking for that elusive job in Silicon Valley, a management consultant looking for a seven-figure salary with an MNC, the biotechnology PhD looking for a position with the major drug manufacturer different people, but all craving for that Utopian dream job. Whether they reach their goal or not, chances are that all of them will tread one path that of Naukri.com, India’s first job portal, launched way before the dot-com wave in early 1997. Naukri differs from many dot-coms in other respects too. It received its funding not during its launch, but only after three full years of existence in April 2000. Unlike most other domains, Naukri in fact scored over even offline competitors, including many vaunted placement firms, registering almost 300 percent year-on-year growth over the last few years.

In fact, Naukri’s revenue figures over the years make for spectacular reading, putting to shame all the doubting Thomases ever ready to construct epitaphs for all dot-coms. It clocked Rs 35 lakh in 1999-00, Rs 92 lakh in 2000-01 and Rs 3.85 crore in 2001-02, with a cashflow of Rs 14 crore in the last quarter. Breaking even in December 2001, Ambrish Raghuvanshi, CFO with Naukri, expects revenues of Rs 10 crore in the coming fiscal. To meet this goal, Naukri is trying to follow a relationship-oriented approach, and building a sales workforce. It is expanding its base in markets like Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Dubai and Singapore. Besides this, it is only doing selective advertising in markets where it has to improve visibility.

Over 5,000 live jobs relevant for Indians are available here at any point in time. No job listing is more than 30 days old. Naukri is updated twice a week, has 12,000 listings and 36,000 vacancies, and boasts approximately 4.5 million page views a month. Till a few months ago, registration with Naukri was not mandatory. However, the company’s present user base is somewhere around three lakh users. According to Raghuvanshi, though Naukri generally does not have a policy to track people, however, at a given point of time there are 5,000-6,000 advertisers with them. Approximately, around 10-20 percent of users are placed through Naukri.

Raghuvanshi believes that what allowed Naukri to score over competitors like Jobstreet, Jobsahead or even Monster India was the fact that it did not over hype and never invested in building brands. Instead, it has always let the user build the brand and in only selected areas has it gone for a brand building exercise. Another factor is that unlike its competitors, Naukri’s focus has not been totally IT-centric, so when the downturn happened, it did not affect it much. Adds Raghuvanshi, “We will continue to focus on industries which are growing, like insurance, CRM, call centres, etc. Besides that we have also focused on bulk growing, which means we grow through our franchisees in cities where there is tremendous potential.” To start with, Naukri has started with the Northern region (Chandigarh, Amritsar, Dehradun, etc) and later on plans to take the model to the Western region.

Naukri has also managed a wonderful synergy between its online and offline models. Two years ago it was purely a dot-com player, but now the online part constitutes only 60-70 percent of its business. As far as online recruitment is concerned, the share is somewhere around 70-75 percent and is getting reduced to 65 percent. According to Raghuvanshi, the online model has higher scalability, whereas the offline model has higher margins. As part of its plan to spread into an offline mode, Naukri acquired a headhunting firm called Quadrangle somewhere in November 2000. “It helped us in giving an insight into the brick and mortar business and in concentrating on the fulfilment part rather than just having online initiatives.”