An Interview with Founder of iimjobs.com, Tarun Matta

Ans.Back in 2008, being a jobseeker, I did not find the traditional recruitment sites effective in helping me find interesting job opportunities. I observed that others in my peer group also had to depend on various unstructured channels to find good jobs. So, I started iimjobs.com as a blog to aggregate jobs that I found interesting for my friends and personal network.

Today, iimjobs.com works with a team of 70 members across technology, customer success, operations, sales and marketing platforms.  We receive close to 8 million page visits a month, reach out to over 5,00,000 job seekers and more than 30,000 recruiters. Given that the website features some of the best jobs in banking and finance, consulting, research and analytics, sales and marketing, human resources, IT and operations sector, iimjobs.com is now the largest recruitment site focused on the premium segment of the market.

The intent wasn’t to build it as a business but interestingly, people liked it, told their friends about it and that’s how we grew via mouth of word advertising. Having begun as a blog, we did not require any initial funding. However, once we became a full-fledged business in 2010, we raised funding from One97communications, India Venture Partners, India Quotient Seeders and a group of angel investors.

Ans.We are very exclusively focused on the premium end of the recruitment space which is essentially providing amazing job opportunities to graduates from top-tier business schools within the mid-senior management hierarchy level.Other traditional recruitment companies don’t have a focused approach nor do they have high quality job opportunities that are advertised via iimjobs.com. The quality of jobseekers registered on iimjobs.com is something you’ll not find through other channels.

Most importantly, our product is very customer friendly as the focus has always been on building the product keeping the candidate in mind.

We’re in a way revolutionizing the recruitment industry in India through some truly innovative offerings such as the ability to follow relevant job opportunities via tags or a comprehensive recruiter dashboard system, real time communication, video profiles, and other various other features.

Ans.To bridge the gap between recruiters and candidates in the technology sector we launched hirist.com – a niche job board for techies. At hirist.com, we connect the best tech talent with job opportunities in software development, project management, Android, iOS, UI/UX and other such areas.

Ans.Every company should have a social media presence to remain relevant and stand out amongst the crowd. They should embrace social media, take advantage of the various platforms available, connect with influencers, and have channels to incorporate feedback of the end users

Ans.All of these models have their own pros and cons; in the B2B space some of these are more relevant and effective. In terms of social media, LinkedIn is the right platform which should be leveraged to connect with the audience. Apart from this, e-mail marketing and content marketing are very useful as they help a brand to establish itself as a thought leader and industry expert .

Ans.It’s been a really fun and interesting journey till now with a lot of roadblocks, stumbles and key learning’s along the way.As an entrepreneur, I’ve had to wear different hats on numerous occasions. I think that being innovative, revolutionary and unfazed by failure are some of the qualities which have helped me on this entrepreneurial journey.