August 11, 2009 at 14:45Selection of work in RuNet
At the end of last year, I, like many, was left without work, but with an impressive loan, this prompted me to actively seek work. One of the wonderful days I came to the personnel officer of a company, on the basis of which several Internet projects were launched and promoted, including a recruitment project. I came to an interview for a vacancy in this project.
After the interview, I was asked to prepare a development strategy for the service and the ways in which it can be monetized. Shortly before that, I worked in a fund investing in Internet startups, so I had a good idea of how to cope with the task. But! It turned out not so simple.
So, there is a site with a certain number of registered users (according to my estimates, about 100,000). The users are mostly inactive.
What is needed? Monetize the service.
What is the problem? The service is non-unique, no different for the better from those available on the market. And, therefore, you need to come up with some features that will be so valuable to the user that they will force him to register at least one more account besides that available on hh.ru, and maybe even pay some money for additional services.
The first thing I decided to do was to study the market, both ours and foreign.
Recruitment Market.
Runet sites in the field of recruiting services can conditionally be divided into several groups:
• Free job search sites (job.ru, rabota.ru)
• Sites with a business model based on the provision of paid services to employers (HeadHunter and others),
• Sites with a business model based on the provision of paid services to applicants (cvonline.ru and others), relevant, by the way, during the period of unemployment,
• Communities in the field of business relations and job search (MoiKrug, Executive).
In the West, there is one service that occupies the lion's share of the job search market - Monster.com (which, incidentally, was planning to enter the Russian market 2 years ago). And of course, many different competitors and rivals.
Development strategy.
1. Adding psychological testing (like the tests that are offered during an interview). This will allow employers to carry out the selection of specialists by employers, not only in terms of knowledge and experience (as implemented on all Runet sites in this niche), but also in personal qualities. Such a mechanism can be implemented by allowing users to fill out their profile on their own, or by using psychological tests to determine certain qualities of a person. By itself, work experience does not speak about a person’s potential, but the presence of certain personal qualities will make it possible to select the candidate for the right vacancy most accurately.
2. Slightly shift the user profile filling towards the full profile profile. The main task is to attract users who are not in the process of finding a job at the moment (for example, high-level specialists rarely look for work - they are usually headhunted by competing companies, or work is searched by friends and is very fast). At the same time, the employer interested in a particular person will be able to make an offer. This will allow the resource to move away from positioning the service as a database with “secondary specialists” and “unskilled specialists” (the vast majority of Runet resources) and shift it toward the database of highly qualified specialists and their business connections. None of the Runet services fell into this niche, as indirectly confirmed by the popularity of LinkedIn among Russian users.
There are also possible additional services that can be implemented within the project in the future (statistics on areas that are interesting to applicants, determination of the “cost” of a specialist, etc.).
Business model.
At that time, it made sense to focus on generating income from businesses - employers who could be offered various additional services for staff recruitment (the situation has changed a bit now):
• Advanced selection of people by parameters,
• Search by passive resume,
• Paid priority in the vacancy database,
• Paid places in the weekly newsletter (to which the applicants subscribe), etc.
In case of successful repositioning to the “service of highly qualified specialists”, it will be possible to provide additional paid services to end users, including, for example:
• Advanced user profile with additional features,
• Requesting friendship directly, but not through friends,
• Paid priority in the resume database,
• Opportunity contact a person for a fee, etc.
All these proposals are not particularly original and I could not come up with any killer chip, however, the work was completed, sent and left unanswered. Access to the data was not provided to me, so I feel free to post part of the analysis here.
Probably I will not post the link anyway. True, I don’t want to advertise to people whose HR does not consider it necessary to even answer a letter after the work done :)
Questions.
I suggest thinking about this:
• How much is the effort to promote a project that users are not interested in and which traffic is just catching on to pay off? Recall also the vspomni.ru project.
• What features did I miss and what could be thought up that would be revolutionary in the Internet recruitment market, because it is obvious that this market is interesting.
PS Judging by alexa.com, site traffic has not increased, there have been short-term ups, at the moment the service’s traffic is equal to the one that was a year ago.
After the interview, I was asked to prepare a development strategy for the service and the ways in which it can be monetized. Shortly before that, I worked in a fund investing in Internet startups, so I had a good idea of how to cope with the task. But! It turned out not so simple.
So, there is a site with a certain number of registered users (according to my estimates, about 100,000). The users are mostly inactive.
What is needed? Monetize the service.
What is the problem? The service is non-unique, no different for the better from those available on the market. And, therefore, you need to come up with some features that will be so valuable to the user that they will force him to register at least one more account besides that available on hh.ru, and maybe even pay some money for additional services.
The first thing I decided to do was to study the market, both ours and foreign.
Recruitment Market.
Runet sites in the field of recruiting services can conditionally be divided into several groups:
• Free job search sites (job.ru, rabota.ru)
• Sites with a business model based on the provision of paid services to employers (HeadHunter and others),
• Sites with a business model based on the provision of paid services to applicants (cvonline.ru and others), relevant, by the way, during the period of unemployment,
• Communities in the field of business relations and job search (MoiKrug, Executive).
In the West, there is one service that occupies the lion's share of the job search market - Monster.com (which, incidentally, was planning to enter the Russian market 2 years ago). And of course, many different competitors and rivals.
Development strategy.
1. Adding psychological testing (like the tests that are offered during an interview). This will allow employers to carry out the selection of specialists by employers, not only in terms of knowledge and experience (as implemented on all Runet sites in this niche), but also in personal qualities. Such a mechanism can be implemented by allowing users to fill out their profile on their own, or by using psychological tests to determine certain qualities of a person. By itself, work experience does not speak about a person’s potential, but the presence of certain personal qualities will make it possible to select the candidate for the right vacancy most accurately.
2. Slightly shift the user profile filling towards the full profile profile. The main task is to attract users who are not in the process of finding a job at the moment (for example, high-level specialists rarely look for work - they are usually headhunted by competing companies, or work is searched by friends and is very fast). At the same time, the employer interested in a particular person will be able to make an offer. This will allow the resource to move away from positioning the service as a database with “secondary specialists” and “unskilled specialists” (the vast majority of Runet resources) and shift it toward the database of highly qualified specialists and their business connections. None of the Runet services fell into this niche, as indirectly confirmed by the popularity of LinkedIn among Russian users.
There are also possible additional services that can be implemented within the project in the future (statistics on areas that are interesting to applicants, determination of the “cost” of a specialist, etc.).
Business model.
At that time, it made sense to focus on generating income from businesses - employers who could be offered various additional services for staff recruitment (the situation has changed a bit now):
• Advanced selection of people by parameters,
• Search by passive resume,
• Paid priority in the vacancy database,
• Paid places in the weekly newsletter (to which the applicants subscribe), etc.
In case of successful repositioning to the “service of highly qualified specialists”, it will be possible to provide additional paid services to end users, including, for example:
• Advanced user profile with additional features,
• Requesting friendship directly, but not through friends,
• Paid priority in the resume database,
• Opportunity contact a person for a fee, etc.
All these proposals are not particularly original and I could not come up with any killer chip, however, the work was completed, sent and left unanswered. Access to the data was not provided to me, so I feel free to post part of the analysis here.
Probably I will not post the link anyway. True, I don’t want to advertise to people whose HR does not consider it necessary to even answer a letter after the work done :)
Questions.
I suggest thinking about this:
• How much is the effort to promote a project that users are not interested in and which traffic is just catching on to pay off? Recall also the vspomni.ru project.
• What features did I miss and what could be thought up that would be revolutionary in the Internet recruitment market, because it is obvious that this market is interesting.
PS Judging by alexa.com, site traffic has not increased, there have been short-term ups, at the moment the service’s traffic is equal to the one that was a year ago.