Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

A new controversy has just begun.

It all started today morning when Economic Times came out with an article stating that Timesjobs.com had overtaken it’s competitor Naurki.com, in the three years since it started operations.

Timesjobs.com is supposed to have close to 150 million page views a month, almost 30 million more than it’s nearest competitor Naukri.com. Also, Timesjobs has close to 30.73 lakh active resumes compared to 27.29 lakh on Naukri.

Vineet Jain, managing director of the Times group said

We just put our heads down and worked hard. A smartly differentiated product, backed by a great team, cutting-edge technology and superb communication did the trick for TimesJobs.com. Our understanding of new media helped us in cracking the market in less than three years,

However, the whole thing just might be an exaggeration. As Rashmi Bansal, editor of JAM magazine, points out in her blog that Nasscom figures state that there are an estimated 1.1 million Indians working in IT and ITES sector. And the sites claim to have close to 820k resumes, which means that almost 75% of the 1.1 million have their resumes on the website. On top of that, it is said that the market for jobs is going to grow at a rate of 50% every year.

Gautam Ghosh, one of India’s most prominent bloggers and HR consultant, heard about the whole situation and shot off an email to Naukri.com. Here is the reply that he received.

We disagree with the Economic TImes article and the advertisements released by Timesjobs :
1. As per Alexa and Comscore naukri remains by far the leading jobsite in India. On Alexa the three month reach of naukri at 855 on April 15 is more than thrice that of Timesjobs which is at 257. According to Comscore, Naukri got more than 2.3 million unique users in February as compared to slightly more than 1.3 million of Timesjobs.
2. In fact as per Alexa, Timesjobs has slipped to fourth place behind Clickjobs.
3. The statistic that Timesjobs is referring to is “Active” resumes in the last six months. Here Timesjobs has a different definition of “Active” as compared to naukri. In Timesjobs if you open a job alert email and click on a job in the email to go to the site you are treated as an active user. In naukri you are an active user only if you update your CV or apply for a job or are a new registrant. We do not count clicking on a job in a job alert as being “Active”. If we did have the same criteria our active resume count would be far higher.
4. Finally, Timesjobs is encouraging people to register more than once on their site. The email from Timesjobs to a job seeker given below is self explanatory (the bold and highlighting in the email is ours).

Content Sutra, replies to the Mirchandani’s statement by stating that Alexa is not the best of the measurement tool. However, it’s the most popular. See a check done by us below. Naukri is far ahead in page views. And what is also surprising is ClickJobs.com (of BharatMatrimony group) has shot into the top league.

The Alexa chart is given below.

However it needs to be added that Alexa is the best way to rank the sites without looking at the server logs. Also the difference that can be seen in the page views is still quite huge and I’m sure that no matter how bad Alexa is, it cant be off by a factor of 200-300%.

All said and done, I do think Naukri.com might be getting more traffic than Timesjobs.com or any of the other competitors. Though whenever I went searching for a job, Monster gave me better results that both of these sites.

Which of these do you think is a better service?

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ET | Rashmi Bansal’s Blog | Gautam Ghosh | Content Sutra | Naukri.com | TimesJobs

Update : Business Standard on the issue