He has come at a right time when you all know how the market is. He would be telling us all about how his business is doing which is basically about the job market largely.

I was a journalist for a while. For about two years in THE PIONEER I was consulting Editor of the career supplement avenues and before that of the marketing supplement USP. Actually, that was a great learning experience for me, being in a newspaper organization, actively writing. But before that, I have been an entrepreneur since 1990. Prior to that I worked for two years in marketing in a company that is now called GlaxoSmithkline. Before that I worked in advertising for three years. I did my MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.

SANJEEV BIKCHANDANI: All along it has been a dream of mine to found a company and be independent, do my own thing which I did in 1990. For the first seven years, we did a lot of small stuff. We were operating out of my house -- a servant quarter/garage. I was using a second-hand computer, second-hand furniture -- everything. In 1997 we launched naukri as a brand with the company. The company is called Info Edge. At that time, there were only 14,000 Internet accounts in the country. We had no idea that it would become big or that the Internet would be a great thing. But we happened to be in the right place at the right time. We worked hard, we worked smart but we also got lucky.

We received the first front of funding from ICICI Venture in 2000 and that was one big turning point for the company. We were able to utilize that funding to expand the company. We grew right through the last meltdown, we bought JeevanSaathi??, we launched 99acres; last year, we launched a brand called Shiksha which is an education portal. Recently, we have launched a site called firstnaukri??? which is for campus hiring. We were listed in November, 2006.

Our business is now profitable; it is fairly large as far as Internet business goes. It is a very small company, otherwise. We did a turnover of Rs. 240 crore, last year, which is big for an Internet company but small by other standards in India. We employ about 1,600 or 1,700 people, all over India, across all our nine businesses. The bulk of our revenues – more than 80 per cent -- still comes from naukri. The other sites are still in investment mode.

The slowdown has impacted us. Hiring is down. Fewer companies are hiring as compared to earlier and they are hiring fewer people and our revenues come from companies who want to hire people. But having said that, we are still profitable and we are still growing, although slower than before. In our opinion however, the worst is over as far as hiring is concerned. What we have discovered in the past is that hiring is a lead indicator for the rest of the economy. So, we see a slowdown, maybe six to nine months before it gets reported in the media and we see a recovery may be six to nine months before it gets reported. What we are already witnessing is that December was the bottom. So, barring another external shock, it is likely that the worst is over and you are going to see a recovery. It may be a slow recovery or may be a fast recovery. But already January-March has been better than October-December for us. So, we expect gradual improvement every quarter and we expect returning to reasonable rates of growth in the economy, may be in the second half of the financial year.

•SUBHOMOY BHATTACHARJEE: Have you ever thought of starting an employment data index considering that you have such a huge data which you could mine?

A few months ago, we launched Jobspeak which is an index of employment. It measures hiring activity, not employment because we measure the activity on our site. We started this in July 2008. We have got 16 million resumes growing at about 10,000 a day. We have got over 30,000 organizations that use us for trying to find employees, trying to hire people and at any point in time there are more than 70,000 job listings live on the site.

•SANJEEB MUKHERJEE: You said that there are some lead indicators of a slight revival. What are the sectors where the revival is taking place?

There are some sectors where there has been medium term to long term dimension???. Clearly, real estate is one of them. Anything to do with exports will not recover until the US and Europe recover and that will take a year, two years. If you look at software, there is a challenge because there is a huge dependency on the banking and financial services industries in US and Europe and they are in a bit of a mess right now. Until we kind of recover, you are going to see demand issues for the IT sector.

Campus hiring this year has been a disaster. If you leave out the top 10-15 business schools and may be, the top 20-30 engineering colleges you will find a large proportion of the batch remains to be placed and those who have been placed, many of them have accepted jobs that they would not have wanted to accept a year ago and the average salaries are down.

Typically in a slowdown, campus hiring gets hit first and in recovery, campus hiring recovers last. The next placement season may be a challenge. A lot of IT companies which had made offers have postponed joining dates by six months, 12 months. That is a challenge.

•SANJEEB MUKHERJEE: Where is this revival coming from? Which companies are planning to hire?

Six industries continued to hire even through the worst period. Those were education, healthcare, pharma, FMCG, telecom and insurance. Insurance is hiring not because the industry is doing well; insurance is hiring because there are new companies coming in, fresh investments are coming in and they need staff. It is not as if the companies, the businesses are doing well.

•VINAY SITAPATI: In a previous Idea Exchange, when the American columnist Thomas Friedman, he argued that one of the problems with the US stimulus package is that they propped up banks, companies like General Motors, but they failed to notice the huge number of startups which make use of credit. The stimulus package does not address them. Do you have the same problem here that startups like yours that relied on initial funding with ICICI will now find it very hard to come across cash?

When we started the company in 1990, there was no venture capital available. We had to struggle for six months to get a Rs.30,000 OD limit from Bank of India. When credit dries up, when there is de-leveraging, small companies are, perhaps, hit harder. But small companies are also more agile and flexible and they can change their business faster. They are more innovative entrepreneurs. So, there is a plus and there is a minus.

•VINAY SITAPATI: What about the nature of Government intervention?

I don’t think Government of India has the money to intervene in a larger manner. If you are talking about Rs.1,00,000 crore or Rs. 2,00,000 crore of infrastructure spending, you are talking about giving out large sums of money to companies -- the Government does not have that flexibility in India. So, this two-three trillion dollars packages overseas is not something Government of India has. But, we must understand that the Indian economy is not hit as hard as the Western ones. Wherever you were selling to businesses, that got hit. But everywhere else, there was not much of an impact. Small companies are at the bottom end of the food chain and we have a huge credit issue. I do not know what the solution is. It is very hard for the Government to micro-manage.

•SURABHI AGARWAL: You launched firstnaukri.com at a time when campus recruitments are at all-time low. What is the response that your website has got? Secondly, are Indian companies hiring key management people from abroad?

First-naukri was launched in January 2009. If it will make an impact, it will make an impact next year, not this year. This year we will spend time getting the product and value proposition right. As far as hiring talent from overseas is concerned, I think companies are being very cautious and very selective right now. Companies have been burnt very badly in Q-3 last year. Companies had hired in April and given increments in last April assuming 9 per cent growth. When that did not transpire, companies were stuck with very high costs. They are not going to hire aggressively in a hurry. There may be some hiring going on from talent from overseas, but I do not think it is a lot as of now.

•RISHI RAJ: What was the recovery in some of the sectors that you mentioned? Is it at the middle management level, at the entry level or at the senior level?

I think it is level-agnostic. In general, wage inflation is a lot less than it used to be. It is just that companies are not looking for talent right now in many sectors.

•DHEERAJ NAYYAR: Do you think enough companies try and address the revenue side and change business models when there is a downturn? Or is there is too much emphasis on cutting costs?

When a company becomes large, it is very hard to change course. Changing a business model is easier for a 20-person company, a 20-person startup than it is for a 20,000 person company. In general, when large companies try to change business model, it takes several years. Do companies focus on revenue? Yes, they do. But, if there is a slowdown and there is a demand issue, there is only so much you can do to chase revenue in a contracting market, so companies, willy-nilly, have to look at costs.

•SUNNY VERMA: What are the challenges you faced when you started out?

When we launched, there were only 14,000 Internet accounts in the country. So, the market itself was very small. Secondly, we had no capital. So, we had to bootstrap, somehow get by. At the same time, bootstrapping has advantages. We were forced to break even to survive because if we did not break even we could not run next month. We basically had a model that was breaking even. A lot of the dotcoms that failed in the last meltdown was because they got too much money too soon and they did not really have a business model in place.

•UTSAH KOHLI: How easy or tough was it to scale up your business?

When we started out, we were nine people; we are more than 1,600 people today. Basically we took it month on month, quarter on quarter and did what was required for next month or for the next quarter. When we raised venture capital in 2000 we were 16 people. It was only once we raised venture capital that we began to scale. We took up a rented office in NOIDA, plaza space; hired people, products, technology, servers, sales staff. But we took it step by step. We hired maybe four sales people in Delhi. Then we discovered that a sales guy could break even at his own cost within three or four months and start contributing. That’s when we realized it was a good model. We just kept hiring sales people and kept opening sales offices in other parts of the country. As we grew, we put in some systems on how to manage the sales force, how to manage the sales effort and that is how it happened. It is a more incremental rather than a grand five-year plan and vision.

•COOMI KAPOOR: To what extent has the Internet taken over the market for job advertising from the media and to what is the share of your company in the Internet market?

If you look at volume of jobs or number of jobs, I would say the Internet has may be, 90 per vent share while print has about 10 per cent share. In revenue terms , the print medium is bigger. In terms of naukri’s share, I think the February traffic share of naukri among all job sites in India was about 61 or 62 per cent. It has been increasing over the last six-seven months. In a slowdown what happens is that while we do get impacted, our competition gets impacted more and, therefore, we expect to emerge in a stronger position relative to competition when the recession is over as opposed to when we into the recession.

•SANJEEB MUKHERJEE: You have diversified into several others. How do you see them growing compared to how naukri?

Jeevansaathi is an out-and-out consumer business; but the revenue comes from individuals. Managers are more demographic driven than economic cycle driven. So, growth there has been steady. It has not been impacted. On the other hand, the real estate market has been hit very badly, so, while 99acres did very well in the first half of the last year -- it grew at 98 per cent -- it did not do well in the second half. We expect a challenging year for 99acres simply because the real estate sector is going through a lot of turmoil.

What is selling today and is selling very well is affordable housing. Affordable housing means Rs. 40 lakh in and around Delhi, may be Rs. 20 lakh in smaller cities, may be Rs. 50 lakh or Rs. 60 lakh in Mumbai. Anybody in that pricing range is selling well. So, we expect that in the real estate industry over the next year or two, there will be some restructuring and transformation. Some of the old stock, the old pipeline will be converted into affordable housing. People who were planning premium housing will have to change their plans and launch a different kind of product. But, we do expect at least two years of pain in the real estate sector.

•SHAILAJA BAJPAI: In your opening remarks you described how you were able to tell six to nine months in advance whether things are going to be bad and six to nine months later whether they were getting better. What were the indicators of a slowdown six or nine months before it was first reported?

In June, 2007, the stock market was going crazy and we began to see the first bit of pushback from our IT clients -- we got indications that all may not be well in the months to come. So, we began to give out cautious notes in our analyst calls saying in IT there may be a challenge going forward. The kind of mood in the economy, the mood in the press in those days was actually very, very positive.

In April, 2008 we began to see pushbacks in the rest of the sectors. So, by May and June we had begun to put out very cautious noises on the rest of the economy. We did not anticipate the extreme kind of freezing up that occurred in October-December. But we knew by April-May-June that there was going to be a problem. What we are seeing now is that in all likelihood the worst was over in December as far as hiring activity is concerned and that is a precursor of the rest of the economy. But there will be sectors where the challenges remain for a year or two.

•COOMI KAPOOR: IIM Ahmedabad produced a whole lot of entrepreneurs and you have been quoted somewhere as saying that you felt the model earlier was right both in recruitment of students and the syllabus but today there are just too many engineers.

What I said was that you need a diverse class. You need a class with a diverse background in order to get people to benefit a lot from the experience there. Diversity in a class makes a big difference. I also feel – and this may be slightly controversial – in general, entrepreneurs tend to be somewhat non-conformists, they do not do the usual thing, they do not do an MBA and take up a salaried job which they can. India is a country where if you are a good student, you sit for the IIT entrance and if you are really good you clear it and you join. If you are the kind of person who is doing `the done thing’, then, perhaps, you will not become an entrepreneur. So, when you admit 93 per cent engineers, perhaps, it is a sample of people will not necessarily become entrepreneurs. I think there is a bit of an issue there as far as the IIM admission policies are concerned today.

•SURABHI AGARWAL: Is the popularity of naukri.com overshadowing your other properties?

They are all separate brands. When we launch a new site, we typically do a soft launch – get the product out first, try to get some traffic in. It takes us a year to year-and-a-half to continuously improve the product as the market gives us feedback. It is only after a year, year-and-a-half we start investing behind promoting the brand. 99 acres was launched it in August 2005; we released our first ad on TV in March-April, 2007. We do not like to spend a lot of money on promotion till we get the product right and we are patient as far as getting product right is concerned. So, on Shiksha???, for example, we are spending a little money on Google but we are still getting the product right.

•SURABHI AGARWAL: What about new products?

We have made investments in three start-ups. One is a company called Aplect which has launched a site called merit-nation which is delivering K-6???-K-12??? education online. That is meant to supplement your schoolwork. We think education is a very big sector.

•SURABHI AGARWAL: Do you think people would actually pay to go on a website?

First of all, we have run a profitable site when there were 14,000 Internet accounts in the country. Right now there are between 50 million-80 million. Then there is the money people spend on private tuitions today. We will be asking for a tiny fraction of that. If you look at what happened in the Indian education school scene over the last 20 years, there has been this massive move towards democratization of quality education. Earlier, everybody got into IIT was from four or five big cities.Today, you find that many people going to IIT are from smaller cities. Of course, there are large numbers from large cities because Internet penetration is high in larger cities. But you are getting a lot of traction from smaller cities simply because they want access to the same quality that Delhi students have. So, I see the Internet and sites like merit-nation???, playing a part in the democratization of decent quality education.

•Coomi Kapoor? Why do all your sites have Hindi names when you are advertising in English?

The Internet in India is still predominantly in English. There is very little local language computing in India. The language of organized business in India is English. As far as names are concerned, we wanted to be different and distinctive. When we launched naukri.com in 1997 we were, one of the few Indian websites with a Hindi name. At that time it was different, it was distinctive, it was cool and it had an attitude. It also communicated clearly what we are about.

You are also designing CVs for the candidates. How much does it add to your revenue?

Not a lot. It is a good, small business and profitable. But the bulk of our revenue comes from companies and employers looking to hire people. We have got 30,000 clients who use naukri.com to try and find employees. The top 3,000 clients give us 60 per cent of our revenue.