Mirror mirror on the wall - who is the No.1est of them all

I wrote a couple of hundred words about nothing and nine people commented and encouraged me to continue blogging. Thanks guys.

Ah. The burden of expectations.

So here is my second post.

Over the last two weeks several friends have asked me why bragging rights are important as to who is India’s No. 1 Job Site.

The truth is that users of job sites (whether job seekers or recruiters) already know which job site is No. 1 for them. A recruiter knows how many people he hired from where and at what cost and time per hire. A job seeker knows how many relevant jobs he found when he did a search on which job site. Similarly he knows how many interview calls he (or his friends) got by putting up his resume at which job site.

Response is measurable. Evaluation is easy. And no claims by any job site can beat what the user believes from word of mouth and personal experience. So the user knows the truth. You can't make it using smoke and mirrors.

Hence our reluctance to spend serious money in claiming we are No. 1. We spend money on brand building advertising on television and on immediate response advertising on the Internet.

For us our No. 1 claim is something we put into most of our communication along with our logo. For the simple reason, that it is the truth.

But it has not been the central theme of any of our paid communication recently – because if it is the truth the user knows it already. If this is not the truth that he has experienced, then no amount of saying so will convince him otherwise.

(Emails we send to our users and what we say to the media don’t fall into the category of paid communication)

But a more important issue is how No. 1 should be measured.

Of course aggregation is important – of jobs, resume’s, recruiters, job seekers and applications. However mere aggregation is Job Site 1.0

Job Site 2.0 is way beyond that. While some of our efforts go into defending and possibly increasing our leadership on aggregation, over the last two years a greater part of our efforts have gone into addressing issues that we believe will take us to what Job Site 2.0 will be about.

When you create a large job site with plenty of aggregation you may have solved one problem for the user but you have also created a whole set of new ones. What do we do with applicant spam, what do we do with recruiter spam, how do I find that one resume I need out of the jungle of millions of resume's in the database, how do I find the three jobs that are relevant for me, what do we do with the fake resume problem and so on.

The next frontier lies in the areas of improving the user experience through better UI, better use of analytics, better and faster search, better assessment of intent of user, better search result ranking algorithms, better matching of intents of the job seeker and the recruiter, compatibility assessment, solving the employee reference check problem, incorporating Web 2.0 features into our offering and also taking the site beyond the Internet and onto the mobile.

And that's what we are working on these days. To lead the market to Job Site 2.0, where we will go beyond mere aggregation to create value for users, and thereby consolidate our leadership.

Aside

Within our company after the Timesjobs, “Everyone’s quitting naukri” campaign broke there was some concern for a couple of days. However soon enough both Marketing and Sales people were smiling.

The Marketing guys were happy because our daily new resume registration was up by twenty percent (even though we were off television) without any change in the marketing inputs that we were providing.

The Sales guys were delighted that by putting forward the claim that they were No. 1 because they were bigger than Naukri, Times was effectively saying that Monster is at best No. 3.