Dhruvakanth B. Shenoy, Country Manager, Monster Middle East &, VP, Marketing, Monster India

Dhruvakanth B. Shenoy has a 15-year association with the Indian advertising and marketing industry, starting with a two-year stint at TGL Quick Foods, a local FMCG player. He shifted to advertising in 1989 when he joined Clarion Advertising Services (now Bates Clarion) as Account Executive. In the two years he was with Clarion, he worked on HMT Watches, which at that time was India’s No.1 watch brand, and Kwality Biscuits, South India’s No.2 biscuits brand.

Thereafter Shenoy moved to Ogilvy & Mather in 1991 where he worked for nine years. As Client Services Director on the IBM account, Shenoy developed a fascination for Internet-related businesses. He quit O&M in June 2000 to pursue his interest as an independent Internet business consultant, under the trade name NetLateral Consulting.

Dhruv joined MonsterIndia.com in November 2000 as Marketing Manager. Now as Vice-president – Marketing, Shenoy spearheads all marketing initiatives at MonsterIndia.com, which includes marketing communication in consumer and employer spaces, brand management, content management and alliance partnership management.

Recently, he was appointed Country Manager of Monster’s Middle East operations. This responsibility is in addition to his current India marketing role. Excerpts from his interview with exchange4media’s Pallavi Goorha:

Q. . What is the resume base at present and how much increase do you anticipate this fiscal?

We are currently close to 9 million registered job seekers. We have 8.1 million resumes. We are growing at 500,000 resumes a month.

Q. What percentage of your resumes comes from smaller cities?

We get 60 percent of our resumes from the Top 8 cities, namely, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. The rest of the resumes come from smaller cities and towns.

Q. Do you have any plans to diversify into real estate, matrimony or any other business?

We have no plans to diversify into real estate, matrimony or other Net businesses.

Q. Which sectors have contributed to the growth of the online job recruitment business?

Initially, the IT industry embraced online recruitment. In fact, as a business we owe a lot to the IT industry for supporting us through the early years. Even today, the IT sector is a dominant contributor to the online recruitment business. This is because the potential of an individual company to hire is higher in IT than in any other sector. However, what we are seeing of late is that other sectors are showing the potential to grow at the same pace as the IT sector, if not faster. In the months/years to come, we believe that manufacturing, BPO, financial services and retail sectors would hire in large numbers through online recruitment.

Q. Today Internet has undoubtedly come a long way in India. What fuels the growth of online recruitment in India?

Internet has grown as a medium tremendously over the last three years and today it has a base larger than the combined readership of all English newspapers put together. There are times when people refer to the Internet medium as niche but with the growth it has seen, it is anybody’s guess as to which one is more mass – the Internet or the newspapers. Internet has a 5-7 per cent penetration in India and, therefore, the potential to grow is phenomenal.

Secondly, the HR fraternity has realised that the people they want to hire in the age group of 21-35 years are on the Net. An efficient use of the medium makes Internet recruitment much cheaper than any other mode of recruitment.

Q. Any plans to foray into countries other than the Gulf?

Monster had just announced its entry into Mexico. Monster worldwide will be looking at opportunities as and when they come up.

Q. How important is India a market for Monster?

The Asia Pacific has always been an important market for Monster and with the India business doing extremely well, the focus and investment in the region is on the rise.

Q. How do you see the growth of online media in India? What is the biggest challenge it faces at present?

Given the penetration of Internet, growth of the medium will not be a challenge. However, the maturity of the medium will be tested when it comes to scaling up e-commerce transactions or converging with the mobile medium.

Q. How would you assess the performance of Monster.com?

I think we have done pretty well. This business is all about how many new quality profiles we can showcase to employers. And it’s important to do so better than anybody else in the business. We revamped our product in February this year and I must say that job seekers and employers have embraced the new product. We continue to get mails from job seekers about how easy it is to search for jobs. Thanks to the user-friendly product and aggressive marketing, both online and offline, we have had more than a million registrations in the last two months.

Q. What are your core propositions and what kind of strategy have you adopted to counter competition?

Getting new job seekers is extremely important. That’s what our business is all about, i.e., how many new resumes we are able to acquire. We believe that a job seeker comes to a job site to search for jobs and that we should make it as easy as possible for him/her to do so. The redesign of the site has worked well for us because job seekers now realise that we are respecting his reason to come to our site. Secondly, thanks to our sharp search engine, we are throwing accurate results. When you have accurate results coming up, the satisfaction level of a job seeker goes up and he is inclined to use the site more.

Q. . How have you built the brand over the years? Television seems to be the preferred medium for advertising. Is there any specific reason for that?

I wouldn’t say TV is the preferred medium. It is one of the mediums we have used. Being an Internet brand, our first preference has been and will always be the Internet. In fact, we have been on the Internet every single day since the day we started advertising – that was almost six years back. I am not sure if any other brand in the country can make that claim. For an Internet brand, advertising on the Internet provides the shortest route to the site.

Of course, we have also used print and television fairly aggressively. And we will continue to do so as long as it fits in with our reach strategy. While Internet is a primary driver of traffic and, therefore, resumes and applications, advertising on television, we believe, contributes to the brand salience. Today, in terms of our focus, apart from our presence in Internet, we believe there is a large role TV can play in terms of brand building.

Our current TVC -- which tries to establish the brand proposition that Monster plays an effective role in finding the right job for people who happen to be in the wrong job -- has worked well for us going by the tremendous growth in traffic and resumes we have received after the campaign broke.

Q. What is ‘Magic Search’? How has it helped improve the search?

‘Magic Search’ is a search product for employers. Historically, resume searches by employers have been based on specific fields such as category, location, education, number of years of experience, etc. Our challenge was to make this simpler, like we had done for job seekers. That is how ‘Magic Search’ was born. It is a search box where the employer can input his search requirements, without getting restricted to fields. The product has worked wonders for us as we have seen that our clients are now using the product very aggressively leading to resume views doubling within a short period of time.

Q. How have things changed after Monster acquired Jobsahead?

It was a good strategy for us to acquire Jobsahead. As a joint entity, we can now synergise our strengths and also leverage on the equity Jobsahead commanded. We were also able to penetrate into a lot more companies because of this partnership, as we were able to offer something bigger and smarter.