Google for Jobs — gjobs = djobs

Sundar Pichai’s Google I/O Google Jobs update sounds too familiar to me in particular.

Out of many releases, google jobs is one of the key highlights. Google for jobs.

We at Dexter Talent Labs tried to implement this idea 2 years back.

A brief overview about Dexter Talent Labs (going forward DTL)— We started DTL as a recruitment firm with an idea to be unique and solve the real problems existing in recruitment industry.

Already there are n-number of recruitment firms in Bangalore. Then what is unique in DTL?

Inspite of having a number of job portals like Naukri, Monster, Indeed, Linkedin, etc there still remains a challenge in recruiting the right person for the right job.

During the year 2002 when I started my career in recruitment, Naukri was a startup. Initial 1+ years of my career I have not used Naukri. I used google and yahoo to search for profiles. If 5 candidates were scheduled for interview, I can easily expect 2 offers and both will join. If I make a call to a candidate regarding job, they used to treat me with great respect . — those were the golden days of recruitment.

Coming back to DTL days, if I / my team call candidates they treat us like trouble makers. As though we intervened in their busy work (can be facebook surfing). Recruiter’s calls are treated like other Spam category calls.

Any recruiter’s sole objective is to increase the conversion ratio. Conversion ratio in recruitment terminology means converting most of the calls into closures (joinees). An ideal scenario would be sending a single candidate to an interview, he/she clears the rounds and joins immediately.

But reality is you lineup 100 candidates, 30 turns up for interview, 5 clears the 1st round, 2 further gets shortlisted for 2nd round, finally 1 gets an offer letter and he/she will have 3–4 other offers in hand already. We keep our fingers crossed for him to join us. If he joins you are lucky else, start all over again.

We at DTL did extensive research and found out that distance to work place from their home location is one of the key criteria which prompts a candidate to select the offer. Eurekaaaa!!!!!! This lead us to work on our own technical solution i.e. an app to search jobs based on distance. Thus the birth of djobs. This app helps candidates to find jobs nearby and for companies to find candidates who are near to the company location or who are interested to travel to company’s location. Idea is if the company is nearby technically even if you forgo a job which has 2 lacs more in CTC than this, still you are a winner. 2 lakhs divided by 12 is 16k+ and 16K+ if you check goes for your daily commute and because you have to travel that far you will end up eating outside. Daily travel and eating outside leads to bad lifestyle which in turn leads to regular visit to doctor and spending the same extra money for hospital, etc ( I have not mentioned the other side effects like less family time, no personal time, etc).

Thus we were convinced that a solution of finding jobs by distance is very important to increase conversion in recruitment by some percentage. Quoting from Mr.Sundar Pichai’s keynote session at Google I/O 2017 about Google Jobs, he quoted that “commute is a key criteria for jobs and they are going to add that filter too shortly”. This we at DTL implemented more than a year back and idea was conceived 2 years back.

Even the layout of Google for Jobs having details about job along with google map clubbed with commute time and distance is like blueprint of our thought process.

With lot of juggling around, we finally released the beta version of our app into playstore (story of this in my later blogs). As a day dreamer, I was of hope that like PokemonGo our app will be viral and we will have millions of downloads. In reality, we struggled to reach our first 50 downloads. It took 10 days for us to reach this number. To achieve this number we kept on promoting it on facebook and other social media. We had lot of appreciations and likes for our post than downloads or atleast shares on their wall.

As they say, idea can be great but execution is key to success. Our execution had lot of flaws. We failed to keep the momentum we created, we took lot of things for granted. We promised cloud while struggling to have a roof of our own.

Key challenges we faced are:-

· High promise to clients but low to no returns

· App was not complete but we already released it to the market

· Many bugs but we addressed it only on weekends (because of part time technical focus)

· One person into sales, marketing, branding, technical issues, etc — I failed to maintain a team which can share my responsibilities. My thoughts and my teams thoughts had no connection I guess.

· Dependency of me in others before taking calls. As a CEO or Head of that operation, learn to take the call than worrying a lot before taking any decision. ( I had the fear in me if I make any mistakes so I went on to take opinion from many that led to lot of confusion and in-turn non-execution of action on time).

· Last but not the least I am a functional person, my dependency on technical folks was 100%.

Hope this experience of mine will help my readers to have 1 or 2 take aways for their startups or ideas in life.

Disclaimer: I had to use this heading to draw attention to my story. Hope google has better execution plan. While I failed to execute well this google’s release made me feel happy that my thought process was in right direction.