Story of a Product Revamp - Naukri Resdex Emails

If you are looking at apply for a Product Manager position at InfoEdge and will like to know the kind of work this team does, take a look at the list of changes we made over the last two years to an established product.

Resdex is the Naukri Resume Database product, which enables Recruiters to identify relevant jobseekers for a specific opportunity and contact them. Recruiters can either call up the jobseekers or send job opportunities as targeted mails. Resdex mails is a popular mechanism of contacting jobseekers and has undergone a major revamp in last couple of years.

1. Addressing Relevance for Jobseekers - Resdex allows recruiters to search jobseekers based on several criteria like key skills, designation, company names, salary, experience, location, education and other criteria as well.  However, Naukri was getting several complaints about irrelevant mails being sent to jobseekers.  Typical complaint being "I have done an MBA from premium college and I am getting call center jobs".  To address this challenge - Naukri introduced mandatory filters for Salary and Experience, however, the choice of the values was left to the recruiters discretion.  We saw a major fall in the volume of email sent (and loss of business) as recruiters started entering the expected salary and experience consciously.  This reduced the irrelevant emails sent to jobseekers who were never the targeted audience in any case.  And since jobseekers saw more relevant mails in their mailbox, the overall response to Resdex mails improved significantly.

2. Apply and Reply from the mail - Naukri has now enabled Apply and Reply from the mail.  Jobseeker can login to Naukri account and apply to the job sent, Or compose a response and attach a resume as part of reply.  The recruiter receives the jobseekers Naukri Profile snapshot along with the resume, the profile snapshot is a standardised template that enables a quick scan of applies. A large number of jobseekers are now checking their emails on the mobile phone and where they may not have access to resume, it gives them an easy way of applying through Naukri and using the uploaded resume to quickly respond to the recruiter message. 

3. Recruiters can view list of Contacted Candidates and Applies by the Job Sent - Contacted Candidates information is now displayed subject line wise (which in most cases represents the Job Title), recruiters can now see which candidate was contacted for which opening. The number of candidates contacted is indicated against each Resdex email subject and link against each subject line can be clicked to view applies received for that email in EApps. Since jobseekers now apply through Naukri, list of applicants is also available to recruiters.

4. Send a Job as Email - After posting a job on Naukri, you can search the most relevant candidates in Resdex and send them the job. Send a Job as Email thus combines the power of Job Posting and Resdex, and helps in closing the positions at the earliest.

5. Automatic Shortlising of Candidates - Searching and shortlisting of relevant candidates from Resdex may require significant amount of time and effort. Now, Naukri can also help in identifying the matching jobseekers. To begin with, this functionality is available if you have posted a job where annual salary mentioned is more than Rs 15 lakhs per annum. The candidates are selected using the Naukri iMatch technology which also powers Naukri Job Alerts. The matched candidates are available in a folder in Resdex which carries with the same name as the job title for convenient access. If you want, you can further shortlist candidates from this set or send the job as email with a single click.

Who made this revamp possible - of course, the product managers, along with the User Experience Design, the Technical Team and the Analytics team.  Kudos to Abhijeet Anand and Praveen Chandran, the two product managers who have led this revamp.

Protecting Your Privacy

Google has changed its privacy policies, which should enable it to access information more freely across 60 services that are part of the Google network. That means, list of contacts on gmail and connections in Google+, will they become available to Youtube and Google search? That is, location co-ordinates on Google maps and Latitude, apps downloaded on the Android phone, search queries, profile on Google+ all can be correlated to gather a 360degree view of the user. This information when collected over time will provide immense source of information about any individual. When a website uses Google network to serve ads and user is logged in to Google+, Google may use the profile information to personalize. That will mean better targeting and more revenue for both Google and the publisher site. Already, retargeting of ads is considered vaulable by the advertisers in attracting customers.

Google is not alone in seeking access to personal profile, behavior and interests information, Facebook is also collecting enormous amount of information through specific widgets like login with facebook, social media plugin used by several blogs and websites to allow Facebook authentication for two way communication. Facebook now knows which site i visited and when, besides everything i do on facebook.

While the ability to gathering information shows great promise for personalization, privacy concerns are natural. That said, users are still in partial control of their information. That may or may not be enough.

How can i protect myself?

1. Remember to logout from Facebook/gmail/youtube/google+, the moment you logout, no information can be correlated. Dynamic ip addresses provide sufficient level of anonymity even though all acts can be traced uniquely to a device.
2. Creating multiple identities for different services of Google network is probably the easiest possible solution. Don't use gmail for the account which is used for youtube or google+. While google may create correlation between devices, browsers and applications used in association with time of use, it will still create sufficient doubt to protect your privacy.  Several users share devices, two or more identities used from the same device may actually correspond to multiple users.
3. Change your service provider to another supplier, even though it appears feasible, it reduces your choice to possibly sub optimal offerings. Therefore, i prefer chosing a different browser and a new account to access these services.

Privacy is and will remain important, frauds are common, in both real and virtual world. Protecting personal information is a must and creating slices of information that cannot be correlated is probably the only possible solution.

What do you think? Will this work?

Social Networking and Purchase Decisions

We value opinions of our friends.  We often meet these friends, talk to them or chat with them.  They probably know my preferences and I know some of theirs.  It helps to know what they bought, liked and if yes, why they liked something versus say another alternative.  We seek opinions about movies, schools, products, travel and almost everything we care about. This weekend I shared my purchase decision and several parameters that influenced my purchase of a flat panel TV and I sought opinion from a friend on purchase of an insurance policy. In general, for all complex purchase decisions which have an element of risk (either monetary or emotional) we seek opinions.

Social networking over the web has helped me connect with colleagues, classmates, business associates and also personal friends.  It helps to maintain relationships even at a distance, across geographies, and also be a silent participant in our journey of life, together and yet, distinct from each other.  I recently saw one of my friends seek opinion about a laptop purchase while movies get debated on why someone liked it or not.  I also see comments on new product launches, for example, iPad and this helps shape opinions of passive listeners as well as the active participants in the discussion. 

Web as the medium helps me get into a conversation without being intrusive.  It is easier for me now to pop the question and have my friends comment on it. For example, a telephone call to seek opinions may be considered an interruption in my friend's daily life and I may not want to call 300-400 friends which I have on FaceBook or any other networking site. 

Social networks continue to shape our life.  I can't really imagine a life without them anymore.  They now seem integral part of our life - how can anyone live without them !! I continue to learn and explore how social networking will evolve and influence purchase decisions.  Do share your insights.

Me Too Google Buzz fizzles out

Since last week, Google Buzz has created buzz for almost all the wrong reasons. First a me-too product and then a backlash on privacy.  As Google has proved to many of its competitors, a me-too product is a hard sell in the world of free web.  An imitation of FaceBook with little incremental value from integration of e-mail was unlikely to work in any case.

Except for the fact that FaceBook does not provide e-mail service, FaceBook is well integrated with almost all major e-mail service providers. 

• You can import your contacts from popular e-mail sites.  After importing the contacts, I can pick and chose which ones to invite and when. 
• If one of the imported contacts joins the social networking site, I get a prompt about the same. I can invite that person and we get connected (LinkedIn feature).
• Discussions forums, new connections, messages from friends, daily network digests are all integrated with e-mail.

Google Buzz started with its good intentions and try to imitate Yahoo E-mail, which has been trying to build a social network gradually by prompting contacts which I can connect to. Needless to say, Yahoo has not succeeded. I attribute the backlash to lack of strong enough positive features in Google Buzz.  Had there been features which everyone wanted, had there been a choice in what a customer wants to do, it might have worked.

The bottom-line remains - if the offering is good, customers are willing to accept inconveniences and faults, but that can almost kill a me-too service which no one wants. All of us are, of course, wiser in hindsight.