Circa 2001: As the general manager of MonsterIndia.com, Mr Krishna Krovi now has a monstrous challenge to face: to replicate in India the brand building success of the parent portal Monster.com, which was launched in the country in the first week of March 2001. The online division of TMP Worldwide, the leading supplier of human capital solutions, Monster.com dominates the online career marketplace worldwide and has 500,000 jobs and a total of 8 million resumes on its resume database. It has revenues of over $400 million.

With the infrastructure in place, the foremost need for MonsterIndia.com is to make its presence felt in the Indian market, which has the potential of growing to 35-40 million Internet users by 2005 from 5.5 million now. It has thus chalked out an online as well offline strategy, in association with Mudra Communications, which is "realistic and practical".

Says Mr Krovi, who refuses to divulge: ``One of MonsterIndia's strengths is the robustness of the products and its technology. The campaign attempts to build a differentiator for MonsterIndia.com through its technology while keeping its focus on the insights we have gathered from the job seekers.''

On the print strategy, the communication strategy is to attract those job seekers who bring value to employers through their skills or experience or background. ``We believe that these people should see MonsterIndia.com as a place where they would meet peers with the same calibre. The campaign essentially addresses job seekers who are confident, skilled and can be an asset to an organisation," says Mr Krovi.

The online presence is designed to reach out to people who are already on the Net. The accent on the Net is to get the job seekers to post their resumes on MonsterIndia.com. The creative units are designed to target job seekers among the universe that visits the sites where MonsterIndia is advertising.

Explaining the thrust of the online campaign, which will break soon, Mr Krovi says: "We would be using a combination of IT-specific sites, horizontal portals, vertical portals and peer sites, with different kind of creative units."

On other activities related to brand strengthening, Mr Krovi said: ``We would have outdoor as part of the plan. Hoardings would come up in Bangalore and Hyderabad by the end of the week.'' MonsterIndia.com also plans to hold events with the recruiter community later during the launch phase.

Though Mr Krovi refused to divulged the extent of investment made, he said that MonsterIndia.com will break even in two-three years time. "Most of our investment has gone into marketing and content and in attracting recruiters", he points out.

Monster.com has two data centres with 200 services each which focus on product development - looking for new services for both the job seekers as well as recruiters.

According to Ms Alison Deans, chief operating officer, ecorp - which is Monster.com's partner for India: "The idea is to leverage on the cumulative experience of Monster globally. The major plus in that is the fact that Monster is the only online recruitment site which is part of TMP Worldwide."

MonsterIndia.com has identified the segments which would be targeted in phases. Initially, the focus is on IT, telecom, sales and marketing. Later, it would be extended to media, electronic media and then the financial markets.