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A Sanjiv Bikhchandani’s favourite line is, “You’re
always looking at a job, even when you’re not looking for
one.” It’s a maxim that has paid off in a big way for
this intrepid entrepreneur. The founder of Naukri.com claims
over 5.5 million registered users, 918 employees, 33
offices, 20,000 clients and a 65.43 per share traffic share.
Today, not only does Bikhchandani own India’s top jobs
website, he also never has to look for a job-for himself,
that is-sitting on top of a company with a turnover of over
Rs 100 crore.
Bikhchandani’s job story started in 1990, when he quit
a lucrative management job at Glaxo Smithkline (where he
earned Rs 8,000 a month) to start his own jobs venture since
he saw colleagues queuing up all the time to look at the
appointments section of business magazines.
| Says Bikhchandani, “These
were highly qualified people who were happy in their
jobs. They were not looking to switch.” Jobs, he
realised, are an extremely high interest information
category for almost all people. The second observation
that stayed with him was that every few days some or
the other head hunter would call and try and entice
one of them to consider a change. It seemed there were
hundreds of head hunters in the market, each with a
handful of clients with vacancies that were not
advertised in the appointment columns. By early 1990
he concluded there was probably a large, highly
fragmented database of jobs out there with HR managers
and head hunters, which if someone were to aggregate
and keep current would be a very valuable resource. |
WEBMASTER: Bikhchandani saw a niche and quickly
rushed to fill it. The IIM Ahmedabad graduate is now
moving into weddings and real estate online
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Keeping this at the back of his mind, he quit his job to
join his partner. “We set up office in the servant quarter
above the garage in my father’s house. I had recently
married Surabhi, a classmate from the Indian Institute of
Management, Ahmedabad and we also lived in the same house in
one of the bedrooms. We paid my father a rent of Rs 800 a
month for use of the servant quarter.”
He started off his company doing salary surveys but the
company was too broke to pay him, so the house was looked
after by his wife who worked with Nestle. He taught
management over weekends at various places like the Times
School of Marketing to earn around Rs 2,000 a month.
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Naukri has stuck to the job
posting, it never tried to become a portal of content,
career building articles and all that |
In between, for four years, he got a job as a consulting
editor of The Pioneer and ran its careers supplements,
something made possible through chance meetings with editor
Chandan Mitra. Later, as Mitra bought the paper,
Bikhchandani helped him restructure operations to cut costs.
In 1996, during a visit to IT Asia at Pragati Maidan,
Bikhchandani saw a stall with a “www” sign and got his
first exposure to the Internet and what it could do. The
forgotten database suddenly looked useful, so staffers began
combing 29 newspapers to build it up. His brother was given
a 5 per cent stake in Naukri for offering to pay $25 a month
to a web-hosting firm. Naukri also homed in on the NRI
market. It figures 5 per cent of the 55 lakh registered
users on Naukri are NRIs looking to move to India, or
looking for a job in India to prospect long-term settlement
in India.
For Bikhchandani, who started out with the motto of being
“Better, Cheaper, Faster”, growth has been fast indeed.
From just 6-7 people in 1997, the figure rose to 16 in 2000.
The trickle turned into a torrent. “It took us six months
to get our first check; it was Rs 2,100 from an auto
components firm in Pune. In April 1997-98, the company had a
turnover of Rs 2.35 lakh. That rose to Rs 36 lakh in
1999-2000.
That’s when the VCs began calling. But Bikhchandani
turned them down, till in 2000, Naukri gave ICICI Ventures
15 per cent for Rs 7.3 crore just before the dotcom bust. In
a crowded employment company market, Naukri has succeeded
because of the following reasons:
- It has stuck to job posting, it never tried to become
a portal of content, career building articles and all
that.
- Market understanding: As and when new
industries were coming up the main categories and the
home page links were changing. The trend of Software,
then outsourcing, then BPOs and then Telecom jobs could
be seen by tracking its home page history.
- Offline Efforts: Naukri has done lots of
offline marketing and campaigning so that its job board
is always full.
For wannabe entreprenuers, Bikhchandani, who has done it
the hard way, has this advice for new entrepreneurs: try and
reduce risks; focus on good execution; sell yourself hard.
With the market in his pocket, Bikhchandani isn’t about to
retire to the hills. In 2004, he acquired Jevansathi.com,
India’s third largest matrimonial site. And in September
2005, he launched the real estate portal 99acres.com.
Bikhchandani, clearly, has come a long way since those
servant quarter days. .
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