Slowdown makes job portals jobless

"Job postings across sectors specially IT-ITeS and BFSI have fallen by 50-60 per cent over the last few months. We have postponed our business ramp ups as client renewals are not happening," said Anand R Iyer, CEO, JobStreet.com.

The company hired 25 people last year but has frozen the recruitments till March next year.

The job portal market is estimated to be around Rs 3,500 crore (Rs 35 billion) growing at a rate of 50 per cent year-on-year. The total number of people it employs in India is about 12,000. The slowdown has impacted this market and layoffs have happened.

"In the job portal market, almost a thousand people have lost their jobs but most of them are in the sales and other non-value-adding jobs," said Ganesh Shermon, partner & head, People & Change Solutions, KPMG.

"Small layoffs are happening in the company but they are at the administration level. There are no retrenchments for people at the operational functions level," added Iyer.

InfoEgde, the company that owns job portal Naukri.com, employs more than 1,700 people and has no plans of laying them off. "Though there is a slight slowdown, but we are not seeing any increase in the number of resumes because people get risk averse in slowdown," said InfoEdge CEO Sanjeev Bhikchandani.

Industry sources say that TimesJobs is not laying off people and Naukri is also not seeing any fall in numbers.

Analysts feel that job portals are not any different from other sectors and business has gone down there also. "The slowdown has impacted every segment of the internet industry and job portals are a part of it. In fact, the slowdown might lead to increased usage of multiple sites for the people to float their resumes," said Sanjay Tiwari, director, Juxt Consultants.

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