Old economy firms begin hunting for heads online

Online job portals are finally finding themselves on the right side of the old economy firms on a hiring spree. After sustaining primarily on the IT and ITeS segments' needs, job portals are now witnessing a steady line of brick and mortar companies signing up with them.

While this sector dubbed non-IT and ITES category was a non-starter till the turn of this calendar, job sign-up under it has now surged to about 35 per cent of all recruitments through such portals. Leaning on this increase, the monthly job sign up has also more than doubled as compared to the earlier levels.

In September, job's netted via these portals were estimated around 1.5 lakh compared to the 65,000 average earlier.

In fact about 80 per cent of in-bound leads are projected from the non-IT category. Industry insiders say that over half the recruitments in the non-IT&ITeS categories come from the manufacturing and engineering sector.

Dhruv Shenoy, vice-president, marketing, Monster Asia says that the non-IT&ITes category has seen an explosion in the last three months. He adds that finally the portals' derisking initiative to rope in the old economy firms as well is bearing results.

"Of course branding and promotion attempts did help. We tapped the cricket season and flashed ads to woo job seekers and companies/HR consultants to sign up with the portal."

Mapping the trend, the industry projects a 60:40 balance between the IT&ITeS and non-IT category by April 2005.

A senior official of Naukri.com says that the old economy firms are still experimenting with online job portals. Typically, the first set of experiments set the tone for the future. If initial reactions are to go by, then the manufacturing and engineering firms will definitely stay with us, he adds.

Industry watchers say that non-IT and ITeS companies had signed up quite a while ago, but they were dormant till very recently, preferring the traditional methods of recruiting.

Other sectors, besides manufacturing and engineering, fuelling this move are finance, sales, advertisement and marketing, HR and healthcare.