Q&A with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of naukri.com

Following last week's email exchange with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO of Naukri.com (according to Alexa, India's premier job site) I invited him to answer a couple of questions that might be of interest to the readers of this blog.

How has the response to RSS been?

We launched RSS less than a week ago. We have done no promotion of the feature - no press release, no ads, no banners on other sites - nothing. The only promotion is on naukri. So while it is a bit early, the response is as expected - a small number of tech savvy users of naukri have asked for RSS feeds and a few dozen more ask for it every day. We find it encouraging. Should RSS become a hygeine factor on web sites then we are happy to be there early. While a few hundred a week is a small number over several weeks it adds up and the cumulative RSS feeds going out after a few months will not be an insignificant number. What it also does for us is that ensures that you don't lose even an infrequent visitor to naukri or a passive job seeker so long as he came to you once and set the appropriate RSS feed.

What should we do about spam to registered users of naukri?

While there is no foolproof answer to spam we have taken several measures to minimise it.

The first thing registered users of naukri should do is to set their privacy and mail options to the ones they want. You have already detailed these options out in this blog earlier so I will not repeat them here.

In case you have made your resume searchable (to ensure a higher chance of finding a job you should go for this option) and you find that there is a client of naukri who is accessing your resume by searching our database and sending you irrelevant mail you can send a complaint to abuse@naukri.com. We go through each complaint and wherever we find a client stepping out of line we warn him and if he repeats his behaviour we may even suspend his subscription temporarily. In a few cases of extremely stubborn clients we have even cancelled subscriptions and have refunded the balance money. However to tell you the truth this is an evolving situation and there are some clients who are not very well versed with email ettiquette - so they have to be educated. It is still relatively early days of the internet in India for some users.

We also have a few dozen dummy CVs of our own in our database. Should we get a spam mail from one of our clients at the email ids in the dummy CVs a flag goes up and we monitor the activity of that client closely and talk to him even if there is no complaint from a registered user.

We have recently introduced SMS in our resume database. Instread of sending email to a registered user of naukri recruiters can send an SMS. SMS offers many benefits over email to recruiters - response is faster, open rates are higher - in effect you recruit more and faster. One difference - you pay for each SMS you send, whereas email is free. We feel smart clients will increasingly use SMS for the benefits it provides and because each SMS is paid for they will be targetted better than emails currently are. Simple economics.

We are also planning a few other measures which we will announce closer to the time of implementation. We are focussing on the problem - every Monday we have a product planning meeting in our office and spam has featured prominently in our meetings for the last several weeks.

Any ideas or suggestions will be welcome

Emphasis in the posts is mine - Gautam.
I think they have a point in the SMS usage by recruiters. It'd be interesting to see how the job-seekers react to it. Would you respond better to a SMS by a recruiter than an e-mail?