Indian Online Recruitment Industry in India - Need for innovation !

Today I recieved another spam mail through naukri.com. It asked me to join some egroup.

Naukri and the other job sites in India should seriously monitor how their customers data. Isn't that fair for people who give them access to their information?

Naukri itself is guilty of spamming mailboxes, after they started their matrimonial search business.

There's an urgent need for the basic job boards to move up the value chain and take a leaf out of the tricks that theladders or wetfeet have been upto.

The only question is: Will their investment in their existing business model allow them to disrupt their own businesses?

I guess not.

When you are big (and believe you, Naukri is big, it is ranked 750 as of today on Alexa) it's so much easier to innovate incrementally than to bite the bullet and take the industry to the next level.

Interestingly someone like Timesjobs is doing a much better job in innovating (of course, it helps if you have the enormous financial pockets of the Times Group behind you!) and starting things like the Virtual Job Fairs.

Update: I got a mail from Naukri.com's CEO Sanjeev Bikhchandani asking for the instance of spam. Great to see them responding so soon to a blog post (28th March)

Sanjeev clarified naukri's email policy today (29th March) in an email. So if you need to change your settings please go ahead !

He writes:

1. We do not send mail to people who have not registered with us. Those who have registered with us have privacy settings in their account (on the first page of registration actually) wherein they can choose to make their resume unsearchable (you will get no mail from our clients who search this database), in fact your CV will not even be seen by them. You can only apply to jobs on the site and you will get job alerts from us.

2. You can choose also to not get job alerts from us

3. You can choose to not get other promotional mails from us. Jeevansathi mails were in this category.

So while I was changing my settings at their site I noticed that I hadn't noticed a fair bit of innovation by Naukri, integrating RSS feeds into job searches ! They've done a fair bit of user education about RSS feeds at this site for the layman. I wonder what's the adoption of this innovation amongst their users. I've sent a mail to Sanjeev and am waiting for a response.

So I take back my harsh pronouncements that Naukri hasn't been innovating enough for user experience. I just hope that the rest of the online recruitment industry in India is also evolving at this level!