Sometime this year, the Delhi-based English daily The Hindustan Times will launch, among others, an online recruitment portal. That'll make it the second national daily to do so, after Bennett, Coleman & Co's The Times of India. But won't their online recruitment portals cannibalise the classifieds and weekly supplements that both the newspapers publish? Sure, but the two print media giants reckon that they would be better off letting one of their own divisions eat their lunch than the two biggest players in the online recruitment space: Naukri.com and Monsterindia.com.

There's another reason why the Rs 150-crore online recruitment business is hot: It is growing at a blistering pace. Naukri.com expects revenues to double to Rs 90 crore end of this financial year, while Monsterindia.com, which acquired Naukri's top competitor JobsAhead.com in June last year, hopes to grow rapidly too, although it wouldn't share revenue figures with BT. Recruitment advertising in print, estimated at Rs 350 crore, is growing at a relatively modest 20 per cent a year. Industry analysts estimate that by 2008, online revenues at a projected Rs 500 crore may be nearly as big as print's. "Our competition is not another jobs site, but newspapers because they still have a huge pie of recruitment advertising," says Arun Tadanki, President and MD, Monster Asia, whose motto for India this year is "Shred" (paper shreds).

A Growing Market

Today, the recruitment market is primarily split among three categories of players. The daily newspapers, placement agencies/ search firms, and recruitment portals (see The Recruitment Market). According to industry estimates, there are 5,000-odd placement agencies (headhunters included) that account for more than half of the industry's revenues of Rs 1,100 crore. As for the portals, there are about 10 of them in India, although "every placement agency thinks it has a jobs site of one kind or another," says Rajeev Gaur, General Manager, Timesjobs.com, which claims to be growing faster than both Naukri and MonsterIndia.

There is some amount of overlap in terms of advertising between print and the portals, but Benoy Roy Chowdhury, Business Head (Media Marketing) at The Hindustan Times, says that advertisers typically prefer print when they are looking to hire middle- to senior-level executives, while the portals are preferred for entry-level recruitment. (Headhunters only do expensive, top management searches, while placement agencies have actually helped expand the online market).

How does a jobs portal make money? Mainly from corporate customers, who pay anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 45 lakh per annum to post vacancies and buy mailers to the database. They account for 75 per cent of the revenues of a portal like Naukri. Placement consultants account for another 20 per cent, while the rest comes from job seekers, who can post their resumes for free, but must pay between Rs 850 and Rs 3,000 for services like resume writing and resume mailing to consultants.

So, the name of the game-no matter whether you are Naukri, MonsterIndia or Timesjobs-is volumes. The more CVs posted on your portal, the more employers want to do business with you. Says Puneet Dalmia, who co-founded JobsAhead before cashing out last year: "Growth in this sector has to come from volumes, and that's what the battle is all about." How do recruiters decide which job portals to advertise with? Apparently, that isn't such a hard task. Says T. Hari, Senior Vice President (HR), Satyam Computers: "We are agency neutral, we choose sites for a pattern of skill sets and geographical areas." Interestingly enough, though, within the MonsterIndia fold, JobsAhead and Monster are positioned differently. The latter is priced aggressively, while the former is higher priced. "Both are great products and we want to sandwich our competition in the middle," says Tadanki, who headed sales at JobsAhead before joining Monster.

Monster Aisa's Tadanki: The JobsAhead acquisition has balanced things some

While all the big recruitment portals boast of advertisers from a variety of industries, they are primarily dependent on it and it-enabled services. For example, 54 per cent of Monster and JobsAhead's revenues comes from the IT sector; in the case of Naukri, the figure is 40 per cent. But now both Tadanki and Sanjeev Bikchandani (incidentally, both are IIM-A grads) are looking at pursuing other sectors aggressively. Monster is looking at growing its business from banking and finance, pharma and textiles, while Naukri is chasing specialised verticals such as engineering and pharma. Says Bikchandani: "We still see it as being big spenders, therefore, the value will come from it and the volumes from the non-it sectors."

Who's #1 in the Indian market? It's hard to tell, since both Naukri and MonsterIndia-JobsAhead claim to be the leader. MonsterIndia won't reveal its revenue figures either. There are two websites, Alexa.com and Comscore.com, that monitor traffic on all sites on the Web, but their numbers are again disputed by the two rivals. "Comscore's MediaMetrix is independent," says Tadanki in defence of Comscore numbers that put MonsterIndia ahead of Naukri (15.38 million unique visitors versus Naukri's 14.86 million, as per MediaMetrix's May 2005 report). Counters Hitesh Oberoi, Director (Marketing), Naukri: "Our ratings on Comscore were low and jumped immediately when we subscribed to them".

But bragging rights don't matter as much as the industry's growth. On that count, both Bikchandani and Tadanki are optimistic. The overall recruitment market is expected to more than triple to Rs 3,500 crore by 2008, with online recruitment accounting for Rs 500 crore (print will account for around the same, may be a bit more with the rest coming from head-hunting and placement services). What'll drive the expansion? Tadanki says three things: Creation of new jobs, people switching jobs, and wage inflation. Another thing that the online recruiters have going for them is the rapidly growing population of internet users. Today, Nasscom, India's software lobby, estimates that there are 35.6 million internet users in the country, compared to English newspaper readership of 19 million. By 2010, the number of internet users could grow to 100 million, compared to 47 million English newspaper readers. So don't expect the online recruiter wars to lose steam just yet.