6^th Annual Edition

On the sidelines of the CIO100 Awards, 2011, Hitesh Oberoi, MD & CEO, Info Edge India, shared how he revolutionized the recruitment market by launching India's first job portal at a time when the country had a mere 16,000 Internet users.

When we set up shop in 1997, the Internet landscape in India was in its formative stage. There were only 16,000 Internet users in the country. This narrow Internet user base could have thwarted our purpose of launching a job search portal but we had a firm belief in the potency of our business idea.

We were quick to recognize the immense business potential of the Internet and, at the same time, we could see that the recruitment business was in a state of flux. And we latched on to the opportunity. We surveyed the recruitment market and sensed the opportunities that came directly from consumer insights. We realized that jobseekers did not have access to information on most jobs except for the ones advertised in newspapers. Most job seekers knew just one or two head-hunters. The recruitment market was highly inefficient and disorganized and this made the exercise of switching jobs a Herculean task.

We appreciated the fact that people love to keep in touch with the job market even if they are satisfied with their current jobs. So if one can aggregate all jobs available in a database and make it searchable and available to people easily then it could be a viable business proposition. At times, recruiters also want to reach out to people who may not necessarily want to apply to them. If one can aggregate all resumes in one database and make it searchable then recruiters would love it. This, we thought, could revolutionize the recruitment business.

We decided to launch Naukri.com, India's first job search site and Info Edge's Web portal. Initially, it was a garage startup. The inflection point of the company came in 2000 when the dotcom boom brought in good tidings for us. We raised about Rs 940 lakh from ICICI Ventures. Just when we were making steady progress, the dotcom bust hit us. In these testing times we maintained a sharp focus on cost. This strategy helped us weather the dotcom bust.

Finally in 2003, we found ourselves to be well placed. We had generated enough profits to spawn other Internet businesses in diverse and unique business verticals. So we built a large portfolio of profitable Internet businesses: Jeevansathi, 99acres, Shiksha etcetera. In October 2006, we launched an IPO and became the first Internet business to list in India.

We secured immense first mover advantage. We helped companies reach out to a better talent pool. They could now advertise many more jobs than earlier. And to top it all, the recruitment process had now became faster and cheaper. We also brought in more transparency in the job market. Naukri took away the sourcing advantage from established recruitment firms. Now all you needed was a Naukri subscription to start a recruitment business. Today, Naukri has 17 million unique visitors per month and a database of over 26 million resumes, growing at 5 million a year. We get 700,000 job applications everyday. Naukri contributes 80 percent to our revenue.

Today Info Edge is India's most profitable internet company. In 2010-11 our topline was Rs 324 crores and our PAT stood at Rs 84 crores. We are manned by over 2000 employees and have offices in over 40 cities. In the early phases of our business we did thought that our business was a pure play media business. but now we stand to believe that technology plays a vital role in our business. Technology helps us process and mine data.

With the help of technology we have been able to maintain our pole position in the market. And these are interesting times for the internet businesses. The internet user base is expanding at a very fast pace and people are leveraging the internet to gain information. The global recruitment industry is about $400 billion. And we are here to make the most of this huge industry and fragmented industry.