The biggest hurdle that any product company faces is about educating users and getting them to ‘use’ the product : Sudhanshu Arora, Careesma.in

Be it a newbie or an experienced professional, the most common portal they look out during a job search is Naukri. While the recruitment Industry has seen innovations like RoundOne, the Indian market is lucrative enough for foreign players to enter and grab a share of it. A fairly new entrant into this market is Careesma.in.

The Indian recruitment industry is a market of about EUR 2.6BN split into Staffing, Selection & Search. The Search market is currently dominated by HR-Consultants (81% market share), while print (5%) and online (11%) are still small. The online job classifieds market is today worth approx. EUR 100MM and expected to triple in the next 3 years. The industry has successful incumbents that generate healthy revenues.

Careesma is part of Grupo Intercom, Europe’s leading internet and new media company. Grupo Intercom has incubated and grown more than 50 online businesses. The group operates leading jobs boards in, Italy, Poland, Austria and Spain and is now bringing its global expertise to the job portal landscape of India.

We catch  up with Sudhanshu Arora, Co-founder, Director & Country Manager, Careesma.in, for a quick chat on the reasons to enter Indian Market, where they differentiate amongst their competitors and challenges faced along the way.

 What is the motivation to enter India, where there are established companies heading the job search?

India is a fast growing market. The country is witnessing a paradigm shift with a large population going online and using job portals to catalyse career growth. We feel that this is the right time to enter this massive job market and we are optimistic about capturing a significant user base from this growing talent pool.

Though there are many established career portals in India, we believe we could provide more services and features on our portal. In just year and a half, Careesma.in has become India’s second largest job portal in terms of volume of jobs. The portal currently has over 80,000 real and active jobs from more than 8500 active employers. Leading companies like Accenture, Tata, Reliance, Tech Mahindra, Allianz, HCL, Bosch, ING, Hitachi use Careesma.

We believe the market has enough appetite to absorb one more player and we look forward to play a significant role in the sector soon.

 In what ways is Careesma different from existing job portals? Insights on how it managed to become second largest job portal in India.

There are competitors but we stand out on the strength of our technology and business model. We have already brought to India several new offerings hitherto not seen in the Indian job market. Careesma’s strength is its strong technology backbone; the company uses unique algorithms to ensure that only the most relevant, active, genuine and non-repetitive listings are visible on the portal, thus saving time and effort for both recruiters and aspirants.

Also, we are the only job-portal in the country that enables applicants to track in real time the status of their application. We are also the first job portal in India that allowed users to log in using their Linkedin and Facebook accounts, facilitating social sharing of employment related information. Careesma is also the only portal to have the ‘Killer Questions’ feature. This enables the recruiter to customize his search to filter resumes at an advanced level.

The growth that we have achieved in the last two years has been phenomenal and clearly demonstrates that the market has taken a liking to our product. Large recruiters like Reliance, Vodafone, Accenture, TCS, HCL, Allianz, Bosch, ING Vysya and Hitachi, Parle Agro have already used our platform for recruitments and more companies are coming on board every day.

What are Careesma’s plans for Indian Market? How is it different compared to other countries?

We have big plans for a booming and promising market like India. In the near future, we plan to continue to build the best product for Indian recruiters and job aspirants. We are also focusing on getting recruiters and aspirants to try our product and will continue our efforts in this direction. We also plan to launch a mobile app soon.

In the next 5 years in India, we would like to be seen as one of the most effective and innovative career portals in the market. At one end, we will continue to focus on developing new hiring products for recruiters to ensure that they are able to make more informed hiring decisions quickly. At the other end we will keep adding new features to our website to ensure that aspirants are able to find a suitable job quickly.

Please mention the challenges faced in establishing Indian Operations, and what you’ve learnt along the way.

We have seen tremendous growth in the last two years and the challenge for us will be to keep up with this pace of growth. Also, the biggest hurdle that any product company faces in India or any developing country is about educating users and getting them to ‘use’ the product. That then becomes the key to monetization. India has also still not reached the level where most people are Internet savvy when it comes to searching for jobs online. At Careesma, we have taken this challenge head on and are working towards creating awareness amongst our target audience about the benefits of online recruitment in general as well as educating them about the benefits they can get from the unique features that we offer candidates and employers.
Scaling up fast will be a challenge considering the very fast growth we are witnessing. Another challenge is retaining key talent. Talent is the most precious asset of a company, and a scarce resource. We know how difficult it is in India to retain talent in a company, and we will not be exempt from this risk.