Naukri Referral Hiring Product

The new Naukri Referral Hiring Product enables organization to manage the Employee Referral program with considerable ease.  Here is why I think this is an amazing product -

1. Easy sharing of the referred job by employees on their social networks -  Employees can share the jobs on their social networks with a single click.

2. Tracking of applies - Applies can be tracked even if a friend of friend of the employee applies.  That is, if a job is shared by an employee, a friend likes the job and friend's friend applies to the job, employee will get credit of the apply.

3. Management of contact lists - You can manage the list of employees to send the referral mail to. For example, if it is the sales manager job, it can shared with employees in sales team, who are more likely to have sales managers as friends.

For more details, check out the Naukri blog - http://recruiterzone.naukri.com/?p=3173

Do give it a try and share your feedback.

Story of Naukri Job Alerts

Naukri.com is the market leader among with career sites in India, with market share currently at 63%. Naukri.com has 30 million+ registered profiles and a large part of these registered members receive a job alert every alternate day or on a weekly basis. Job alerts only contain freshly posted jobs on Naukri.com in last two/three days. It is probably the main reason why Naukri Job Alerts have one of the highest open and click through rates. Yet, jobseekers complained of relevance of jobs sent. That was identified as one of the important problems to address in early 2010.

The process of improving the job alerts was an incremental one. We built the logic step-by-step and with every incremental step, our understanding of the relevance problem improved.

1. Discovery of “Role” – I tend to believe one major variable than we discovered was “Role”. A deep dive in the behavioral data showed several interesting patterns. Jobseekers were not sticking to their Functional Areas (departments) and were applying across Functional Areas.

a. Pattern of apply clearly indicated that Role was more important than functional area.

b. We had roles which were very similar present in multiple Functional Areas, for example, sales role existed in Industry specific functional areas. GM Accounts existed in Accounts Functional Areas as well as the Top Management Functional Area. Also, several functional areas were close to each other, for example, Accounts and Banking.

2. Limitation of Keyword search – Key skills entered by jobseekers represents what they consider as important. Logically, a search on jobs should use the key skills entered by the jobseeker. However, some of the jobseekers had not entered their key skills. A large gap existed in the key skills entered and their skills as apparent from the CV. We needed a robust mechanism which did not fail because of the data inadequacy.

3. Handling of Categorical Variables – When we compare two jobs and their relevance to the jobseeker, attributes like “role” were important. The key challenge was to translate this into a distance function that can be used in predicting relevance for the jobseeker. Similarly, attributes like Industry, Location required identification of a good distance function.

4. Jobseeker Resume – A match between a jobseeker’s expertise and the requirements from the recruiter is essentially a match between the CV/resume and the Job Description. Of course, there are challenges – if a CV is old or a job description is incomplete, this may not work very well. Yet, we needed a mechanism for matching the candidate CV and the job description.

5. Apply Behavior - It is very much possible that apply behavior of a jobseeker will deviate from the CV/resume.  Apply behavior can provide insight into asiprations of the jobseekers as well as help identify classification errors. Incorporating apply behavior in identifying matching jobs for jobseekers is another significant challenge.

Naukri Analytics team identified the above challenges and incrementally solved them in association with the product team and the technology team. And of course, we noticed a major improvement in relevance feedback from jobseekers.

We are not done on solving this technical challenge. Analytics team is looking to hire smart Data Scientists to join its rank and work on solving these – if you are interested, please click to here to apply.

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.

Is it Hard to Customize Mailer Content?

A bank sent a promotional mailer on “Get a term cover of Rs. 1 cr for Rs 8600/- PA”. It was a well crafted mailer with photograph of a young, dynamic gentleman holding a Play Card with “My Family” written on it and a smile with an exclamation mark.  All designed to catch attention and appeal to the feelings for family members – the right emotion to drive purchase of an insurance policy. 

Only catch was that the insurance premium of Rs. 8600/- PA was applicable to a 25 year, non smoker male with 30 year premium paying term.  And the mail was sent to a 35yrs+ old, female.  The recipient was an active customer of the bank and bank had all the demographic details in their records. 

It could have easily customized the mailer content, by replacing the Gentleman holding the play card with a lady, providing the real premium applicable to the recipient, instead of doing a mass broadcast of the mail.  For an interested customer, it could have been a single click purchase, landing on the login page of the bank, to make the payment of the insurance policy and so on.  The task required was to create two creatives and use dynamic variables from a look up table that can populate the premium values basis the age and the gender with all the caveats.  I bet this would have led to more conversions. 

Do share your thoughts on this topic.

Maximizing Value from New Customer Acquisition

One of the easiest ways of acquiring customers is through a campaign on Google, Facebook or any other platform. We all know the importance of ensuring that targeting is right, ad copy appeals to the target audience, landing page must engage with the visitor and enable conversions to registered members. Clearly, all three variables, targeting criteria, ad copy and landing page, are of utmost importance when acquiring customers through Google / Facebook.


However, all acquired customers are not equal. For a local business, a customer from another city has less than "10% value" as compared to the customer from a nearby locality. A customer who is interested in only deals for smaller value products is less "valuable" as compared to a high margin high value product in an ecommerce setting. Since marketing campaigns require tweaking on an ongoing basis, it is important to use the feedback on “value of the customer” as soon as possible.

Campaigns can be optimized for

1. Maximum response (goal is to maximize number of customers acquired),

2. Minimize cost per acquisition provided a minimum number is acquired, OR

3. Minimize cost per unit value of customer acquisition provided a minimum number of customers are acquired.

Today, there are reliable techniques to predict the “value of the customer” as long as rich profile information is getting captured as part of the customer acquisition process. If the value of the customer can be expressed as a function of these variables, customer value can be fed back for campaign optimization. For example, if we know that B.Tech Computer Science Graduates from Bangalore are more in demand as compared to BSc Physics from Bhopal, that data can be used to run Geography focused campaign on Google/Facebook. Keywords can be characterized in terms of demographic profiles of customers they help acquire.

How are you maximizing value from your customer acquisitions? Do share in your thoughts.

Analytics -Making the Transition From “I Feel” to “I Know”

A young, bright, energetic MBA graduate from a top college joined the “Most Innovative Company Pvt Ltd”. He was full of ideas and keen to change the world with his overflowing cup of knowledge. Within one month of joining his company, he presented an interesting idea to his manager. His manager asked him to learn more details about the company, the business context and prepare a proposal. However, by next week, manager was running after quarterly targets and he asked the new joinee to focus on the targets, rather than the new idea he was pondering over.

Three months in the company, manager asked the trainee to focus on another idea, manager’s pet idea, which he has been pushing for a few years and was not able to move forward for lack of time. The trainee was assigned the task of preparing a presentation, putting the stuff together and do the background work. He got to spend a lot of time of his manager and three months down the line, the proposal was ready.

Since Business Head was visiting for annual review, his manager presented the idea to the Business Head. Business Head liked the presentation but did not feel that idea was significant. He asked the manager (and in turn, the trainee) to work on another project which was Business Head’s pet project. Another six months down the line and much effort spent, even that idea was rejected because CEO did not feel that the idea will succeed.

Does the story sound familiar? A lot of ideas get rejected because the idea champions fail to convince the decision maker. If a decision maker FEELS that idea will not work, that is the final outcome. If you look at the whole story, it was all about different people making decisions on what they FELT will work or not. In the end, idea champions failed to present data and customer insight to support their idea. Projects were conceived because managers FELT that they will work, they did not KNOW that they will work.

That’s where analytics is important, in removing the guesswork from decision making. It is important to use customer insights from data and if data is missing, collect it before making the pitch. Make the decision maker believe that you KNOW that the project will work.