Job search portal Monster.com changed its brand name and offerings for the first time in over two decades of its existence this November. The platform will now be called foundit across the APAC and Middle East markets, a move that was necessitated by the many changes in the recruitment industry over the past few years.
Job portals have been reduced to mere discovery platforms today, but expectations of both recruiters and candidates have changed, points out Saurabh Srivastava, CMO of foundit.
Post the Covid-19 pandemic, candidates are increasingly seeking out remote working opportunities while recruiters are also viewing talent from a different lens, paying attention to elements such as cultural fit and skills.
“With our new positioning as a career management platform, the key changes are in our services and offerings. The changes are so massive that we didn’t want to carry any baggage of a job portal and felt it needed a new brand name and logo,” explains Srivastava. The online recruitment market in the APAC region is expected to grow from $6,825.11 million in 2021 to $12,467.50 million by 2028 at a CAGR of 9%, according to Business Markets Insights.
One of the key differentiators now for foundit will be its hyper-personalisation for both, recruiters and candidates.
Srivastava notes that search itself has undergone a monumental change in recent years, which is why search results on foundit will now be hyper-personalised. “If there are two candidates with very similar profiles and experience, the job search results will be dramatically different for each of them. The same is the case with recruiters. Candidates today give us a lot of UGC (user generated content) by way of their CVs and data. Beyond that, we are assimilating more data on candidates, so recruiters get more than just vanilla information on potential candidates, and they are able to make more informed choices,” he says.
On the back of its rebranding and new services, the brand aims to grow its current base around five times this fiscal.
Moving the goalposts
Hiring and job seeking have also transformed with social networking, which is where a platform such as LinkedIn has played an important part. Mukesh Vij, founder of Hashtag Orange, observes that LinkedIn has emerged as strong competition to existing job portals with the kind of convenience it offers.
“Such a platform allows applicants to apply for jobs irrespective of their physical location. Likewise, recruiters can freely connect with candidates that fit their job criteria,” he states.
With LinkedIn performing
similar tasks to job portals, brands like Monster needed to reinvent and create differentiation. The new entity, aside from jobs, also offers other services such as paid
internships, mentorship and skill-based assessments.
In the current landscape, technology will be a key enabler for foundit. The platform this year held a virtual career fair called Triumph, which saw registrations from over 100,000 candidates and participation from over 50 large organisations across sectors.
“Everything from job interviews to even handing out job offers was made possible virtually during the fair. Both candidates and recruiters today find digital to be more convenient and effective than in-person meetings,” Srivastava remarks.
With the recruitment world seeing so many changes, rebranding can be a powerful tool that can make or break a business, says Mitesh Kothari, co-founder and CCO at White Rivers Media. “Rebranding can create a gateway to acquire new customers if done right, but it can also harm a brand’s equity and create a brand-business disconnect if not executed properly,” cautions Kothari.
To that end, foundit has partnered with Wunderman Thompson Bengaluru for an extensive campaign. Srivastava says that this year, the company will spend around 8-10 times what it spent last year on advertising. “Since we are a digital-first platform and our target audience is largely on digital too, we will use a healthy mix of brand and performance marketing across digital, digital OOH and connected TV for our campaign,” he adds.
While he cannot divulge numbers, Srivastava explains that one of the ways in which the brand tracks its success is by examining the number of job opportunities it has created for candidates, a number he aims to increase at least threefold.