Job portal Monster looks to consolidate position in India

Will build on segments like Monster College and Rozgar Duniya

Job portal monster.com will be expanding both organically and inorganically in the coming year through consolidation of its existing offerings and adding on new features to its various services. Sanjay Modi, MD, Monster India/South East Asia and Middle East said that the portal would add features to its niche offerings like Monster College and Rozgar Duniya apart from strengthening their core business.

Recently, UK-based Marussia F1 Team partnered with Monster Worldwide globally to recruit for a variety of permanent roles in the team. The team recently hired an Aerodynamicist through Monster to play a vital role in the development of the Marussia F1 Team’s next generation F1 race car. Modi informed that applicants from 74 nations, including India, have applied for being a part of the Marussia F1 team.

In the past two to three years, the job portal has multiplied its service offerings to include services for students, professionals and rural job-seekers. Monster introduced its student portal called Monster College last year. Monster College aims to be a one-shop stop for all students to find jobs and resolve career related queries. It also offers interview tips and internship opportunities to students. Individual educational institutions register on the portal and upload student data regularly on the site.

Last year, the portal had forged about 2000 tie-ups with colleges and catered to 180,000 students. This year too, they would be able to reach a similar number, said Modi. Apart from the assessment tool for students to assess their skill level, the portal has also begun offering candidate screening solutions for companies.
 
“Now, we will invest more in helping in the training and education aspect of students on Monster College, so that they are job-ready by the time they graduate. Also, we are also looking at creating branding solutions for educational institutions so that they are able to attract the right kind of companies to their campus,” Modi added.
 
He further said that they would look to tie-up with additional players in the test and assessment market. Further, he said that interactive elements like webinars and online video discussions would also be initiated on Monster College platform.
 
Monster Worldwide also has a professional networking app for Facebook called BeKnown. It helps create professional networks in a Monster environment without leaving Facebook, use the Monster-developed social referral program to share specific jobs through their BeKnown networks.
 
One can also invite contacts from other social networks and connect to Monster’s job search tools and their Monster profiles directly via the app. Modi explained that their focus would now be to make the app more interactive and engaging.
 
On the rural job seekers side, Monster.com has a portal called RozgarDuniya.com. This is a joint initiative of ITC eChoupal and MonsterIndia.com and has about 16,000 registered users. It aims at providing a job portal for job seekers of rural India where they can find relevant jobs in their own geographies and recruiters interested in recruiting in rural areas can find the right resources.

The portal has a brick and mortar presence spread over 9 states and 40,000 villages through eChoupals run by ITC and powered by technology and experience of building and running job portals from MonsterIndia.com.
 
“We are looking to forge several such alliances like the one with ITC, to get a captive source to introduce our services. This is because Rozgar Duniya would not work on a ‘www’ platform as rural India does not very good internet connectivity,” Modi informed. He added that they would be looking at making the site simpler and once they had more number of rural users, they would be looking to use mobile phones to push opportunities. “We may use the SMS system to inform rural candidates about latest job listings and help them apply though a mere push of a button,” he further said.
 
According to Modi, Monster.com has set a target of having 15,000 new resumes every day on the site and has been able to achieve it. Going ahead, he said that introducing new mobile applications and offering the same online experience on mobile phones will be a focus. Their application on Windows 8 will be going live soon and he added that they would later also look to introduce applications for the employers.
 
“Skilling will be an area where we will make more investments apart from technology. We want to start with the basics and move up the curve, in terms of students and rural job-seekers,” said Modi.