How LinkedIn Poses a Threat to Naukri’s Old Recruting Model ?

LinkedIn Eating into Naukri Recruiting BusinessNaukri emerged as India’s Largest Recruiting Platform in the old fashioned way of connecting Job Seekers with Employers. Ability to mine the potential candidate database, short-list relevant candidate profiles, manage their response and the ease/efficiency of doing the same are the most critical factors on which the efficacy of the recruitment service depends. While Naukri.com has been able to sustain its market share through effectively implementing these, alternate sources of recruitment like social recruitment (Linkedin) and advanced search technologies (like semantic search) have emerged.

Linkedin originally a professional networking portal is now increasingly becoming a medium for networking, job listing and passive recruiting. A totally new mode of searching candidates or jobs, Linkedin provides a unique ‘social’ recruiting platform. Corporates are increasingly using Linkedin for posting jobs, passive recruitment (candidates who are not actively looking to change job), building talent pipeline and recruiting for higher level posts.

Various paid features like ‘Recruiter’ ‘Work for us’ add material value to the recruitment process for the employers. From the employee perspective, Linkedin membership not only helps being professionally connected but also doubles up as an alternative resume for recruiting employers. Additionally, job posts provide avenues for active job search for these members. Features like recommendation, endorsements also add credibility to the member profiles further helping corporates to zero in the right candidates.

Semantic Search in Recruitment
The acquisition of Trovix -a leading player in semantic search technologies by monster.com in 2008 provided with such capabilities. Semantic search technology help in filtering resumes by breaking them, structuring the data according to certain key attributes (skills, job designation, work history education) and reduce the resume database to a list of matching resumes without much of human intervention. Availability of such technologies are a big plus for the recruiters who will then buy only the relevant resumes from the recruitment portal hence reducing both the cost and time of short-listing.

InfoEdge, owner of Naukri.Com bought TooStep.com and Makesense Technologies. While MakeSense Technologies is involved in proprietary semantic search technologies, TooStep.com uses SAAS based platform enabling social network and search engine based jobs propagation to wade off the threat from LinkedIn and Monster.Com in India.