No Impact On Business Despite Slowdown In IT Hiring: Naukri.com

A big chunk of hiring of IT professionals happens through jobs portal Naukri.com. In fact, nearly a third of the portal's revenue comes from IT and IT-related business, says Hitesh Oberoi, MD and CEO of InfoEdge, which runs the Naukri.com portal. But has the slowdown in IT growth impacted the recruitment activity on Naukri.com, which works with over 60,000 companies? Mr Oberoi says: "So far, our business has been OK despite the slowdown in IT."

"I have been reading reports of IT companies slowing down hiring...IT growth rate being lower than last year," he said. But even if hiring slows down in IT companies, "they continue to use us", he said.

Mr Oberoi said Naukri.com provides IT companies the "cheapest way" for hiring. "We are the cheapest way to hire. Not all the hiring in all IT companies happen through Naukri, may be 25-30 per cent of all hiring."

"Actually, they depend even more on us as they want to cut down on more expensive ways of hiring," he added.

Demonetisation impact

Overall, InfoEdge gets 70 per cent of revenue from the Naukri business. Mr Oberoi said the Naukri business "did get impacted from demonetisation but not to a large extent. The business is trending very nicely."

Mr Oberoi expects the fourth quarter (January-March) to be much better for Naukri.com, compared with the October-December quarter, in which demonetisation was announced.

"To some extent the business got hit. While the large enterprise accounts were Ok, the ad hoc business - which is the business we get from small enterprises - which hire just 2-5 people a year - got hit in the third quarter," he said.

"That part of the business (ad hoc business) is substantial in terms of number of customers but not very large in terms of value."