Improving job portals via research-backed product features

Abstract

With the advent oftechnology, there has been a surge in mobile applications and the number of smartphone users across India. In 2020, the smartphone penetration in India was 54% and is expected to rise to 96% by 2040. With the rise in smartphone users, access to information has increased. India is a young country and is slowly moving from an agrarian economy towards the service sector. As a result, there has been a huge demand for jobs across the country. Tech apps make the lives oft heir users convenient by solving their problems. One such category of these apps is job portals. Job portals have almost replaced the newspaper jobs classifieds prevalent in the 2000s. Naukri.com (launched in 1997) is a pioneer and one of the oldest job portals in India. Today there are many similar portals like iimjobs, monster, indeed, Linked In, hirect, apna, etc. However, there are still a lot of shortcomings in these job portals both on the side of recruiters and applicants. Registered candidates are not continuously looking and hence there is less stickiness in job portals. There is also the issue of old listings, on both fronts. Candidates, if not nudged, do not withdraw their applications and this creates a hassle for recruiters. The quality pool of applicants is low and there is a massive problem of unskilled labor. Hyperlocal gig workers are unable to find freelance jobs despite there being the technology available to connect them with clients/customers and there is also a language barrier considering the number of languages that ar e being spoken across different states in India. Many users are not tech savvy enough to make the best use of these online job portals. Many a times, they are not well equipped with the knowledge of resume making, job applications, interview preparations, etc. With this project, we aimed to conduct thorough research into this market, its players, and its users to identify common problems. Identifying the trends and commonalities among job portals helped us understand avenues to venture in, leverage existing technologies, and provide feasible yet impactful solutions. These solutions would mitigate the problems faced by users on both sides as they will be focused on solving key pain points. Finally, after prioritizing these solutions to create a product roadmap along with their workings demonstrated by Mockups/Wireframes, we made recommendations aimed at improving these job portals.