Make money by doing good! 
Very happy to announce our investment in Techtribe. Techtribe pioneers a professional community website, and aims to monetize the same through a referral based recruiting model. Whats more, it has an incentive model, where referrers can make Rs 10,000 for each successful referral they make.
Indian e-recruiting market has not seen a major innovation for past 7 years, and we think that this model has the potential to capture a piece of the $400m mid-senior level recruiting market. Its also one of the models around social networking that we have been able to better understand, given our prior experience with jobdirect, jobsahead and clickjobs.
Go out, do your friend a favor, and get paid 10000 bucks for it!
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Great to have a discussion here. My 2 cents on the subject:
1. Quality and competition — with economic incentive, there will be a set of people who will try and make bulk referrals to the detriment of quality. Having a system that can assign a quality rating to a referral is a key to making this work. Rehan, thats part of the reason why its not as simple as adding a refer button. Besides, perhaps fortunately, there is a friction in the online recruiting business in form of an on-ground sales force, which perhaps global players are not looking to invest in right now.
2. Inclusiveness — I do think techtribe will get used by recruiting agencies. There is significant mismatch at the consultants’ end on what resumes they have and what jobs they have, and this can be an interesting bridging mechanism. They have already used job portals for the same purpose in junior level recruiting.
3. Other monetization opportunities — Deepak, Abubucker — great points regarding exploring alternate networking pegs and revenue streams. I think we would do well to explore that thought more.
Thanks, and keep it coming,
More and more companies are working on the “employee referral” model. My company has recruited more than 25% of it’s workforce through employee referrals.The plan is to increase the percentage much higher so the referral bonuses are sky rocketing with up to 50k for a Manager position. Hey, why should i use techtribe ?
The Idea of a Professional network is very important and strategic but to use it for referral networks is bad utilization in my opinion.May be, there are innovative ideas cooking behind the scene.My 2 cents would be to use it for “Knowledge Sharing”, “E-Learning” and “People Analytics”.
I would like to know if the job market in India has any more juice for this kind of service. We have already seen stagnation in a lot of companies. So question is how will this work if there are hardly any jobs on offer. (which may become a reality one year down the line if the dollar keeps increasing)
The other thing is the nexus between HR and job consultants that exists in the Indian IT industry today. (There are innumerable cases where a person gets shortlisted if sent through consultant rather than referral or direct submission..dont say that’s coincidence. Its because HR gets kickbacks from it. Common we all know how this works!)
So if such harsh environments exists, it would be really difficult for a referal system to take shape in Indian scenarios.
What would be really good is to have job portals where discussions on jobs are possible, where people from same companies or same field interact to figure out what kind of jobs they do etc..etc. Most people dont have inside information on companies and their work culture. Its only after they get in that they figure out the details. There should be a platform for sharing such information
Well done! Good stuff on the investment front. Rohit does some amazing PR and I wish him and the techtribe team all the best.
I have to see how this reference thing works – I hope some winners will post their feedback on how easy/simple it was etc. Tech recruitment is a huge pain and I know companies that pay 25,000 per candidate to internal referrals. Maybe it’s just as good to offer the candidate money to put up his own resume for a post – if you get selected you get paid Rs. 10,000 as a “sign on bonus”.
One problem with the site (Rohit, if you’re listening) is that it does not seem to like its own links. I’m getting thrown to the main page on nearly everything I click – firefox or IE – and it doesn’t tell me why. Perhaps because i’m not logged in, but I don’t get adequate notice.
A contrarian view to Bipin’s comment: I think techtribe would *want* consultants to provide references online. It’s obviously a lower cost source for companies, and if consultants can provide references, it’s a good marketplace for recruiters to make money. (What’s wrong with that) Remember, each reference your needs you to have networked with the individual and if you provide an “references accepted/rejected” ranking you can weed out the spammers visually.
Advice you probably already have: You guys should also look at online testing/assessment. If you’re able to get candidates “certified” in any way on your site, through an online test and a follow-up quarterly test or such, the networking possibilities are endless.
Keep up the good work. Go public one day, guys. Naukri gets a 50+ P/E.
what happens when LinkedIn adds a “Refer” button?