Job portals take battle to the real world

The influence of online job portals is now extending beyond the cyber world. The portals are organising job fairs and events as they battle for supremacy to claim the number one recruiting platform position.

Recently, Pune was witness to one such battle with naukri.com and timesjobs.com scheduling their job fairs on the same dates within 5-6 km distance from each other. Meanwhile, Bharatmatrimony's clickjobs.com held a job fair in New Jersey to attract people of Indian origin looking at coming back to India.

This was Naukri.com's maiden foray into the job fair market which began in Ahmedabad, followed by Pune. It will conclude later this month after covering Chennai and Chandigarh.

According to Hitesh Oberoi, chief executive officer and director, Info Edge India, the parent company for naukri.com, the firm is already planning a second leg to cover the metros post Diwali. "This is an avenue for establishing a direct contact and providing a platform for job aspirants and recruiting companies," said Oberoi.

On the other hand, timesjob.com which hosts close to 150 job fairs a year is getting more aggressive. "We will do bigger job fairs and increase the frequency across the country," a spokesperson from timesjobs.com said.

While the job fairs of timesjob.com and naukri.com cater to the domestic job seekers at the entry level "" candidates having up to three years of experience, clickjobs.com has sought to exploit the opportunity presented by reverse brain drain, targeting professionals with close to 10 years of experience.

Last year, 60,000 NRIs moved back to India. "We plan to hold more job fairs outside India and participate in HR events to target senior professionals," said Muruguvel Janakiraman, chief executive officer, Bharatmatrimony.com.

The company's job fair in New Jersey, a week ago, attracted 3,000 professionals and saw participation from corporates like IBM, Yahoo and Oracle among others.

The job fairs by timesjob.com and naukri.com in Pune attracted almost the same talent and also had some common recruiting firms like Fullerton and WNS. The online replication of databases is at 20-22 per cent across portals.

"There was an unexpected turnout of 45,000 candidates over the two days in Pune," said Oberoi. In Ahmedabad, the company's job fair was visited by over 17,000 employment seekers.

However, not all players agree with the need for holding a job fair. "We believe in the power of the Internet and will continue to push that," said Dhruv Shenoy, country manager (Middle East), monster.com.