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Here is a small company from Karachi that has found a great idea with market need. MulazamatTV is a “Video Job Portal” website that provides employers and employees a
richer way of presenting themselves and standing out in today’s hype-competitive hiring market.
The trouble with current job boards, as I have previously pointed out, is that on job boards I am just one company name among a sea of company names on a webpage — no one can really discover my company or get to learn about it uniquely.
Even with the best copywriters behind me, my chance of my job getting appropriate attention is miniscule. It is just from simple laws of media — the more content there is, the less attention to any particular content. Due to this averaging effect, smaller companies see poor response from job boards — poor meaning a lot of resumes from people who were applying blindly and have very little actual interest in your company.
Because of this phenomenon, companies are already gradually moving away from job portals and taking their business either to head-hunters, or are otherwise investing in building greater relationships with universities — in other words, entering into a relationship-based strategy.
Mulazamat offers something fresh - it can let companies put up videos about their firm, their management, their products online among a much more limited set of content. This could immediately be more rewarding — you can’t duplicate offices or products or people or their thoughts, and hence your company’s unique message will get through to the right people and will not be lost on a webpage.
Candidates can get a much better picture of a potential company’s leadership before applying there. Depending on future features, it would be even nicer to let candidates and companies have conversations with each other right from the site before any applicant applies (this is inline with my recommendations on creating conversations on the edge)
Here is a sample video that demonstrates how this medium is much more relevant than text — this is a partial interview with Asif Iqbal, CEO of Post Amazers.
This company is currently managed by two people who started this idea soon after graduating from FAST. They are likely to see competition in this space because of a relatively low barrier to entry (Mobilink has already been running very expensive ad series meant to attract top talent), but I feel that their brand has enough focus that they should be able to build scale quickly with a good production strategy and price point.
Overall, this company is in the right market at the right time. Someone needs to fund them so they can build a professional production pipeline and hire some sales staff.
| Written by Osama A. on 09/26/07 in HR & Mgmt, Software & I.T. |
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September 26th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Idea is great but in countries like pakistan people use dialup connection(very few high bandwidth users).
September 26th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
The idea is very innovative and absolutely new in our country. I am sure this idea would bring the owner lots of success.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
It’s a great idea. Will really help us (recruiters / head hunters) even to provide info to prospect candidates and shun away the negativity which is associated with the industry / services.
But at the end, these are facilitators not replacement to us
September 28th, 2007 at 5:39 am
It’s a great idea , and also the great opportunity for job searcher as well as recruiters.
It makes easy for the job seekers so they do not have to move around and search different sites before they can get a desired and appropriate job.
It also provides platform to the industry which can be used to portray correctly, what your company is all about !
September 28th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
@Wasim - Yes you are right and we did our work on that. You can see from Alexa that YouTube is one of top 10th most visited website in Pakistan.
@Umar - Thanks Umar.
@Salman - Yes that is also our main point, when i interact with young graduates they don’t know which company is doing what kind of work. So, we can provide a platform for Companies to Market themselves to these gradutes and future jobseekers.
@Atif - We are working on the dedicated university portals where companies can interact with the Final Year Students, For the first time, we are putting videos of Students with the projects they developed in their Final Year.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:35 am
I sort of disagree that there aren’t portals out there that don’t let you as employer to stand out. Rozee has paid products that you can use to make your job hot, or be a top employer. Also you can search resumes which is a great feature. As an employee you can search jobs, save your searches. I think that’s by far the best portal locally. Not to mention, they not have very deep penetration the market.
Coming to Mulazamat, with a lot of videos, the problem of standing out will still be the same i.e. “simple laws of media — the more content there is, the less attention to any particular content”
Also entry to market is extremely easy as rightly pointed out. It will take rozee a month to implement same features, only better with a bigger userbase and more cash to back them - not to mention it’s run by an industry veteran who certainly knows what he’s doing (do the math and see how much revenue rozee probably generates from their fairs only, and now products - i know quite a few firms that have signed up for the products!).
I think in order to compete with rozee, the planning, vision and execution should be at par with them; think you are going to compete with Mr. Monis who has started naseeb, rozee, eidmubarak etc. Mulazamat does have some good ideas, but I don’t see a competing business model.
I don’t mean to discourage anyone here, but the first rule of war is ‘know thy enemy’!
September 29th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Thanks Osama, I was about to share the same feelings about Bullying.
Rozee has its own threats coming up in form of Naukri, Monster and other big players looking at the job board market in Pakistan. And I know for sure at least 1 more credible team working on Job Board projects and there previous ventures have been credible as well.
Ali, I think we should allow startups to at least come out and being given a chance. No doubt, due diligence is required to make it a successful venture. While writing this, I was asking myself wouldn’t have Facebook people been affraid of Myspace? Now look at Facebook of todays, its all the rave and yesterdays Microsoft stake of approx. $500M proves its success, market price of around $10bn.
September 29th, 2007 at 5:48 am
Salman,
That’s actually raising a good point — how do you value companies? What makes “good” companies “good” to begin with?
It’s valid to look at pre-money valuation as a yardstick. What else could we look at that is objective?
September 29th, 2007 at 5:49 am
It’s not as if Rozee has completely overtaken the market. From what I’ve been told by friends in the recruitment business, there are some companies out there who aren’t really satisfied with Rozee (which is sort of okay, you can’t please everyone, can you?). So that kinda leaves the playing field wide open for those waiting to grab the opportunity.
Mulazamat is a nice idea indeed but would it be something that’ll get people talking about is something that one will have to wait and see. I hope you guys are planning on presenting your idea in TiE Khudee though.
September 29th, 2007 at 5:51 am
Actually there’s a very good example for this even from within the job boards market.
In the face of Monster, the 37 signals job board simply proposes “Less Hay” as a value proposition. They simply say that they only allow no more than 50-100 positions to be up at any given time, hence an individual company will get more attention.
Laws of media work, but not when your content is miniscule. Its when a company has to worry about whether or not their listing even made it to the front page.
September 29th, 2007 at 5:59 am
One small (immaterial?) suggestion to the Mulazamat guys: I think they need to come out of this a-startup-by-just-two-friends kind of feel that they give out at various outlets - it makes one feel as if they’re dealing with two recently graduated kids. For starters, changing the contact info on the website might be helpful… and also get some tips from an MBA grad.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Osama, good is a very relative term here.
I value uniqueness, individuality of the product/service and what niche’/gray area the product/service tends to focus on?
Have worked on unique segment (shophive.com) and one which is getting new entrants regularly, I think the above points I mentioned are at the helm of innovating and adding features to a solution. With the recent spike with Iphone queries, we have learnt how important role a Blog can play to answer a zillion questions.
Like 37 Signals, I like http://jobs.joelonsoftware.com, which has a unique paid-posting model. Our market is not ready for it yet. http://www.indeed.com is a very robust job search engine though geographically targeting US, UK and Canada currently.
September 29th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
@Ali - we are well aware of the rule of war, Did we ever said that we are competing with Rozee.pk? we have some ideas that we want to implement and want to help the companies and job seekers.
I know it is matter of months or even days for other job sites to implement this thing (Due to large workforce). This means that we should back off? No way. We have nothing to loose.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Nice to see people starring a startup and working on some genuine idea. Tow people with right skills and idea can make a difference.
I agree that the textual searches and filtering provided by Rozee are quite comprehensive, but a picture is worth thousand words. And i am sure a video will be worth a thousand pictures
A better product makes its own space. That was, is and will be the norm. All that matters is what you make. Keep your users happy and you win the market. From history we know that smaller companies are threat to bigger companies, not vice versa. We all know how hard is it to introduce a single change in a large and established framework compared to a beta product.
Best of luck
PS: someone mentioned something like consulting an MBA…lol
November 27th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
[…] to read more? Click here for the full […]
November 30th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
[…] One such recent example has been DevNext Solutions — a tiny dev shop by the people behind Mulazamat (which seems abandoned now) — being acquired by Nuvica Inc. Read […]
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:12 am
[…] MulazamatTV could disrupt the online job boards market (12 views) […]
December 27th, 2007 at 2:19 am
[…] content. Now, on with the regular content…Chalk one up for startups (against the MNC bunch) - MulazamatTV is announcing that their little startup that they launched just some months ago was just acquired by […]
December 27th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
The recruitment business,does need a shake up.
great success to Mtv..
Perhaps it could be that we are seeing the start of something which is obvious ?…
Education is for life..there should not be the division we see from school college to work..
We are currently helping unemployed find work by building a mutimedia CV..including a blog ( the first one in Chinese )The innovation is to
give the employer a” cannot resist reason” to employ the applicant..
The key to all this is if industry had an excellent relationship with local education the CV would be of immense value to employers .and would be carried and progressed thoughout the students career..this would help in sellecting university places via, for example, “pkstudent ”
The fact that 79% of time is spent by students in the west in community sites will happen in PK ?….as one comment suggests it’s all about relationships …
THE INTERNET CAN MAKE TALENT SPOTTING QUICKER AND MORE CERTAIN…
The problem is no one has done the obvious ….offer to build a multimedia progressive profile for students from ,for example aged 15…specifically for
displaying students abilities online where most want to be anyway.?
ian