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.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution has Touched Everyone

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution has delivered on its promise.  While our expectations on what it can do are still very high, I believe we have achieved a lot already. Communication revolution has given IT a platform to make life easier for almost every Indian who can be reached via road, rail, on foot or by the mobile network.  I share some of the use cases and associated stories with you, as in my opinion, they provide a vivid picture of how IT and Communication has changed our lives for the better.

1.       Travel and Ticketing - Most visible benefit of computerization that common man saw in late eighties was “Computerized Railway Ticket”.  With charts displayed prior to boarding the train and real time status of railway reservation, in one stroke, it took away the opportunity of rent seeking behavior. Millions of Indians, who travel daily on Railways, not only saw the benefits, but also became the champions of IT in India. That, to my mind, is the single most driver of IT adoption in India. 

2.       Travel and Ticketing - Internet ticket by Railways is also nothing short of a revolution. A local Internet Café accepts payment in cash and delivers me a ticket without the need to approach the local railway station. Savings in cost of travel to the station and back, no time taken to travel and easy access to railway information, all benefits have been delivered with the convergence of IT and communication.

3.       Real time Communication - 20 years ago, an Aunt of mine was coming to visit us. She lost her way and we learned that she had left her residence a long time ago and by all means, should have reached us by that time. Yet, there was no sign of her.  We imagined that she had probably lost her way.  We went in several directions to look for her. An hour long search and we could locate her, safe yet tired.  Just imagine the scenario today, she carries a mobile phone. We can reach her anytime and she will probably never get lost.

4.       Location Services - A similar incident like the one before. A few years ago, while traveling by train, I woke up with a start. My train was expected to reach by destination at 4am in the morning. It was already 3.40 am and I did not know how much time we had. I switched on my Blackberry and checked my location on Google Maps. We were just 2 Km away from the destination.  The train was running ahead of time. I knew we had to rush and get ready before the station arrived. Google map and easy access to mobile network on a train route helped me find the exact location and prepare me.

5.       New Customers for Small Businesses - Until a few years, for any problem with electric fittings or plumbing requirement, I will visit an Electrical or Sanitary/Hardware shop. I will wait for an electrician or the plumber and leave a message for him to visit us.  A number of follow up visits later he will arrive and do the necessary job. Today, every electrician, plumber or even a domestic maid, carries a mobile phone. They are reachable immediately and confirm their availability.  Everyone has benefited in the process. Of course, except the Electrical or Sanitary/Hardware shop owner, who has lost the cut he used to get.

6.       Mobile Payments - A construction worker was due to receive his wages from the contractor. However, he asked the contractor to keep the wages in his safe custody as he was afraid of losing the money since he had no regular place to stay and risk of thefts. A month later, when he wanted to go back to his native place, contractor made him run around for getting the accumulated wages. With no place for safe keeping, he was at the contractor’s mercy. That has suddenly changed with Money Transfer on the mobile phone. He can now transfer money back home without waiting for his next visit.

I am sure all of us have experienced something similar in our lives. ICT has touched everyone. With new innovations, our expectations are also soaring high.

·         Touch and speech are two new interaction elements which are making IT more accessible to every individual.  Touch phone is more intuitive and so, is speech. Siri is a great beginning in this direction. Speech recognition as a technology holds great promise and with a commercial value attached to quality, I am confident it will soon improve to serve the masses.

·         Another promising initiative is Aadhar. That shall help the common man in opening Bank accounts by providing an identity proof required to access services.  Will banking correspondents make up for absence of banking branches? That remains to be seen.

·         Will remote healthcare delivery graduate from being pilots/experiments and scale up to District or State level delivery models? Healthcare workers cannot replace the expertise of a doctor, yet they can at least provide timely help for the patients.

ICT is a force multiplier, yet it is not sufficient to improve the living standards of the common man.  Without roads, it is hard to make services accessible in the hinterlands. Without drinking water and access to healthcare, progress will remain limited. Physical infrastructure is a must for progress.

iPhone5 does not Wow

iPhone5 is thinner, bigger, faster and has more battery life. There are more apps, Facebook is more deeply integrated and Siri has been enhanced further.  The wave of innovation that started with new magical touch interface and apps that led to phenomenal usage on iPhone, is now abating.  Siri which promised another round of innovation with its voice interface and deep integration with existing apps on the device, has not yet made the same impact as Touch interface did. iPhone5 is almost guaranteed to be the best selling iPhone ever and most selling smartphone. The question is “is that enough”. As a customer, it does not matter - I still get the best product albiet at a high price.  As an investor, I care about long term growth and profitability, while share price moves to near term sales potential.

Apple needs to keep the innovation engine rolling, for margins to stay at current levels. The big challenge facing Apple is the open source, Android and copy cat apps on Android. To protect and preserve long term growth and margins, we may see more instances of legal suits between Apple and Android vendors. That said; it is very hard to control the onslaught of free and open source.  

·         Governments and large companies don’t prefer getting locked in to a proprietary and closed system like iOS. We saw a brief upsurge in Linux as Governments and Government owned institutions backed Linux.

·         However, unlike Linux, Android has the support of application developers and device manufacturers.  

·         Android is already dominating traffic across the emerging countries.  World is more web centric than it was a decade ago.

Can Apple innovate fast enough to maintain a strong lead over competition? iPhone5 disappoints on this metric. If Apple fails again, price competition will soon destroy Apple’s margins or worse, Apple may lose market share.