This is my first Blog so let me introduce myself. I am a Management graduate (2001 batch) with an experience into Pharma, medical devices and online jobs markets.
I've been through direct sales in pharma, a blend of direct and channel sales in Medical Devices and hard core direct sales in Naukri.com corporate sales. Though all of them might sound very different, there are a few things common in all my jobs.
First, I joined all the businesses when they were trying to create a need for their product in the market. Therefore, I always sold a concept rather than a product or service. When I entered into Vaccine business in 2001 it was just the beginning of concept, we sold the concept of vaccination to people at large and we educated Doctors/Hospitals on how to run the business of vaccines. I did the same in the medical devices market, educating the need and ROI of 1 set of critical medical devices for every bed in the hospital.
Now, in Naukri.com I educate my clients on the business of e-recruitment. The investments, savings, returns and quality & efficiencies introduced in the system is the name of the Game.
Second, I’ve always joined an organization at such a point of time or such a territory where my employers didn't have too many expectations from the markets (be it Wockhardt’s 2001 assignment of J&K, or Nepal in 2003 in or a small branch of Chandigarh for Naukri.com in 2005).
I found the lack of expectations from such locations (or in such times) to be very pressurizing. My resolve was to raise expectations of my employers and there was only one way to do it; Raise personal knowledge levels and then raise clients’ expectations from their own business.
This sounds simple but is a very complex psychological game played with facts, figures and data which the clients don’t have. Selling to educated clients in a monopolistic market is a war of wits and is often fought quite independent of selling skills. An investment in e-recruitment products happens only when the client understands the impact of these solutions on his/her own business and this is very very different than the simple desperation for Hiring resources.
And most important of all, I was selling to knowledgeable clients - Earlier Doctors and now HR Heads, and this peculiarity of my job always kept me on the edge of my seat... In fact, I have always been competing with these learned clients of mine who have much wider knowledge of their own domain.
For all the commonalities mentioned above I would now like to address the subject of this blog – “Jobsites – The New Research Tool”
I thought of starting this blog so that I can share my thoughts with professionals other than my clients and help them know how to use jobsites as a research tool also (apart from a hiring tool).
In the current Indian Scenario, especially in IT the present state of affairs is a laughable paradox. The HR managers are worried about the attrition rates in IT industry and at the same time about the hiring woes. Ideally if attrition is a generic problem in the entire industry then Hiring shouldn’t be a problem… someone’s loss will be someone else's gain. However, most of the HR managers are not able to analyze the trends in attrition and hiring till the time they actually land up in the soup.
Although this situation can be easily, and thoughtlessly, be attributed to the demand-supply gap due to rapid growth of industry, but the fact of the matter is that not all the skills sets are being head-hunted all the times. To be in control, you just need to know which skill sets are going to be the next.
IT/IS market is has many idiosyncrasies due to its project dependant nature in Indian Market. The attrition in the industry isn’t always the same across all the profiles. It is dependant on which projects are flowing in the country. The same is indicated by no. of jobs posted on various jobsites for a particular profile. A hot tip on retention – If you track the job posting trends in the jobsites, you’ll know which resources to shield (a month in advance).
A small example to elaborate this. Some 3 months back the no. of jobs related to SAP on www.naukri.com were approx. 950 (out of which SAP functional Consultant jobs were 210). However, as on date there are around 1400 Jobs related to SAP (out of which 398 are SAP functional consultant Jobs), so you know which resources to shield this month.
Another mechanism to follow the same trends is to keep a watch on the new CVs being added to the jobsite database of registered users. For example, the same SAP Functional consultant profile, the no. of new CVs added in the database of a particular jobsite, from June 06 to March 07, are 4300 approx. However, the no. of resumes added in past 2 months, for the same profile, is 2030 approx. This is a much clear indication of the trends in the job market and it is much easier to implement if you have a subscription of one of the jobsite’s resume database.
Perhaps it is high time you took your SAP consultants out of India on a pleasure/project trip… they’d love it and you’d love the fact that they are can’t be approached by competition. The cost of the trip will be less than the cost of hiring new resources ;)
Jobsites have hidden treasures of indicative data that can help you hire better people in right time, retain your star performers before its too late and for entrepreneurs a tool to spot business opportunities. This, however, calls for a lot of data digging and continuous monitoring of the leading jobsites for a considerable time. If you want to save some time then you may reach out for some job search engines like www.careerjet.com which fetch you results for a specific profile from all over the globe.
In the sequel of this blog I would like to elaborate on how HR managers can use jobsites in more innovative ways (not necessarily paid-ones) to optimize their working and how entrepreneurs may get business ideas from simply studying certain web pages. The third sequel will be on how sales guys can raise clients’ expectations from their own businesses and sell better.
Till then please drop in your feedbacks and comments …
-- DK
