More About Zyoin

On 20^th May, Gautam Ghosh, Management Consultant & Blogger has made some interesting observation about Zyoin and also given his tips for success (http://gauteg.blogspot.com/2008/05/some-interesting-websites.html#links)

 

First, I thank him for taking his time and going through Zyoin and also thought of clarifying some of his doubt in this post. This might be useful for my other prospective customers, who make similar observation at their first visit to the Portal.

 

Zyoin, in its current form is a better Job portal. There are lots of useful features that make it better and I will be covering those features below in this post. But eventually, we do not want to be just a better Job portal, but India’s Next generation career portal, that aspires to meet the end to end career needs of the professionals, by providing self learning, self assessment, career guidance etc at one single platform. We launched with the current set of features to be in the market, get in touch with our customers, both the employers as well as professional and incorporate the feedbacks in our future releases.

 

The concept of Job referral will work or not is a difficult question to answer. There are lot of portals that have come up of lately and I think some of them would be successful, depending upon how they approach the problem. According to me, the biggest issue in referrals is that as a professional I don’t know among all my network of friends & colleagues, who is looking for a job change and who has the requisite skill sets matching the job description that can land me a referral fee. Sending all job description to everyone one knows is definitely not going to work. We are working on some models to find some solutions and write about those, ones we see, it’s working.

 

When I say it’s a better Job portal, I was referring to features that make it better and one of the prominent one is end to end Application tracking. Whenever any employer posts an opening on Zyoin, they get to manage the complete recruitment cycle online. Infact some of the employer already have such system in place and we are in talks with them, on how our system can seamlessly integrate with their system. For others, who don’t have such a system, Zyoin can be the starting point for applicant tracking. For employees and referrers too, they are kept aware of the progress of their application or their referrer online. So, I have referred my friend and he can been short listed for the opening, once I login to my account, that information is presented to me in my dashboard.

 

We are also working on convincing customers to extend their employee referral programs to all professional by posting the openings on Zyoin. Here we are offering two models, as an employer, if you post your openings, the responses that come either you can manage (screening & scheduling) on your own or Zyoin can do that for you by charging a fee.

 

If you have noticed, Zyoin went live with as many jobs as the nearest competition. The very reason being is the strong offline business that we have. So it’s not a yet another portal done by techies, but a business promoted by successful entrepreneurs, who are keen to experiment with new concept and have the multiplier effect working for them by taking an offline business online. We have sales team across India working closely with customers and very soon, we will start announcing customers’ signup specifically for Zyoin.

 

One of conscious decision that we have made is not to make it a networking portal…even when we plan to go live with other features that would make it India’s next generation career portal, networking would not be a part of it. We would rather like to use the popular networking portals, rather than ask our users to create one again. For the current set of features also, we are process of launching a plug-in and I will talk about it once it’s out in market.

 

Zyoin – The next generation career portal

Welcome to Zyoin-the next generation career portal.

If you already had a chance to go through the portal, you must have realized that Zyoin is essentially a Job-referral portal or in a broader sense an online recruitment portal. But we deliberately kept our punch line of calling it a next generation career portal, which is in sync with the vision that we have for Zyoin.com

After successfully exiting from our previous organization, we have been thinking of identifying new startup opportunities and online career space came out clearly as an area of great interest. When we defined online career needs of a professional, it consisted of self learning, self assessment, career counseling, peer discussions, getting informed about new openings and taking up new positions. Where as for the hirer reaching to the right candidate and letting the suitable candidate know of the opportunities that they provide is of prime importance. This is the informed assumption that we made.

We also noticed that there is actually no visible player in this area. There are only two successful players with a large number of registered user bases and they are essentially online resume database, eg Naukri and MonsterIndia. We further research and found that there are many other new players and most of them have come out in being in the last one year or so. Some of them are career networking portal and some are job referral portals, but still none of them have covered the online learning and assessment on the same platform, which according to us is an essential career need. But the very fact that many new players have come up that further strengthened our thought that there is a definite gap here and there are many fellow entrepreneurs trying to close this gap.

Our next step was to decide the starting point. Do we do all at once and then go to the market or we just launch a subset of what we intend to do, excel in that and than keep on adding new modules. Let me admit, we took much more than needed to take this decision. Some time too much of analysis leads to paralysis…

We decided to go ahead with a subset of our plan. The idea was to be into the market, see the action in real time and possibly refine the informed assumption that we made about the online career needs of professional. We decided to go live with Online Job referral portal and thus www.zyoin.com went live on May 14^th 2008.

We plan to differentiate ourselves from existing players by posting good quality jobs, providing personalized attention, being professional in our interaction and sending only the relevant resume to our customers.

We also acknowledge the fact that there are other players in the market and we need to constantly innovate to stay ahead of competition. So please go ahead and experience the Zyoin differentiation.