Uday Sodhi is currently the CEO of HeadHonchos.com (an initiative of ABC Consultants), a career portal exclusively for senior management professionals. Prior to joining HeadHonchos.com, Sodhi was CEO of Balaji Telefilms – New Media Business, where he was responsible for building a mobile VAS – mobile entertainment - and internet business for the company. He was also the Sr. Vice President, Interactive Services at Rediff.com for almost five years. In an exclusive interview with India Digital Review, Uday Sodhi talks about his idea behind joining HeadHonchos and the company’s future plans.
Prior to HeadHonchos, you have worked with Balaji New Media, Rediff.com etc. How has been the transition from internet media to internet services?
To be honest, I have been in the services side for a long time. I worked with Net4India and in Rediff I was handling ecommerce and subscription business, which are services driven models within a media organization. Balaji has been a pure media play, but the rest of my career I have been in to the services side.
What is the prime objective of HeadHonchos.com?
Looking at the online recruitment market today in India, the candidates, for the initial part of their careers, have very good online and offline solutions. Also, from a candidate perspective, very very senior people are also taken care of quite well as they are just handpicked in numbers. The problem lies in the mid-senior level where there is not enough information and the challenge for a candidate is that he doesn’t know where to find the right information about jobs. The jobs are actually sitting with consultants and that market is very fragmented. That’s the whole story from where we started on saying that we need to create a portal that addresses that need of the consumers.
For the last one and a half years, both clients and consumers have started identifying us as a platform that owns the niche job market for mid-senior level hiring. That is our USP. We now work with close to around 1000 corporate and around 500 recruitment and have a network of half a million candidates on the one side and about 1500 odd companies and organizations at the other end.
When HeadHonchos launched, you appeared to be turning the job listings business on its head, by asking senior candidates to apply for job listings, and has both basic and premium membership plans. How has this model helped in your growth?
The big value that we delivered to the candidate was to make sure that all the jobs were listed on the website. What we said to ourselves was that can we connect the candidates with the corporate and handhold the candidate to act on what they want to do. Senior candidates typically don’t search for a job all the time, unlike a fresher. They allot themselves a particular time period to find a better job and thus make way for the transit. We step in there and provide all support-related services required for the candidate to apply for a job.
Because we have always thought from the candidate point of view, we have built successful services for the candidates. One big service that we currently run for candidates is building resumes for senior professional, which is not easy. We take a detailed interview of that candidate and from that we create the resume, which is very simple for a recruiter point of view. Almost 2/3rd of the people who have taken this service are VP and above.
The other important service that we have is that handheld assisted search service for the senior professionals. Users can register on the website and apply to six jobs for free, and after six users need to take a subscription and pay. Subscription cost starts at Rs 750 for six months, but an assisted handheld search can go upto Rs 9000.
What is the criterion that you follow while registering senior level candidates?
We take people whose current CTC (cost to company) is Rs 10 lakh per annum and above and the jobs that are going to be listed on the site have to of Rs 15 lakh per annum and above. Each profile created on the site is manually checked and in case of any doubt, we call people and verify. If we are still not satisfied, we pay a physical visit to the candidate or reject the profile and tell him to please come back later. The motto is to make the hiring manager not inundated by CV spam messages in his inbox.
The same senior level job can be found on LinkedIn for free. Moreover one can connect to the desired candidate personally and take the discussion forward. Why would one come to HeadHonchos then?
The difference is that one is a social network and the other is a service and there is a huge difference. LinkedIn is a very good place where I can look for people based on certain requirements. After that one has to find out a route to reach him and the person then has to accept the invitation and then connect. On HeadHonchos, there is a clear understanding that this is a recruitment portal and people here are looking for jobs. While one can be a bit of the other, there is a fundamental difference is the way a social network functions and a recruitment portal functions.
Moreover, there are additional features that we offer to our users. We have very recently launched an education service for senior professionals. Many professionals watch for some time before actually changing jobs. In that time, if they want to take some management course or any other short term course, we provide them with the service.
Today, any consumer-focused internet company in India is spending heavily on marketing. What are your marketing plans?
Much of our marketing efforts to reach out to senior professionals entail Google Adwords, LinkedIn, print media focused at senior professionals like The EconomicTimes etc. For us, TV doesn’t make sense because our product is not a mass product.
Who, according to you is your biggest competitor today?
If an organization is spending Rs 100 for recruitment, then Rs 25 goes to the consultant, some go to the internal references from an employee etc. We feel some of our revenue will come from that money.
What is your take on the online job market in India?
The large homogeneous job market is now being broken up into pieces based on levels like junior, mid o mid-senior etc. Over a period of time, it might become regional, specific to an industry etc and the market will grow bigger and bigger to accommodate more players. As the segment will grow, different business models will evolve. Some innovation will happen in the vertical specific business and discover a great model that can work for you.
What are your broader plans for HeadHonchos in the future?
We are building ourselves as a complete career platform for mid-senior level candidates. That means, besides job search we are also focusing on introducing services that can help candidates in making right choices and decisions for their career.
