HT's shine.com revamps to focus deeply on the digital front

Earlier this year, Shine.com announced a strategic partnership with social recruitment platform MyParichay, making Shine.com the first Indian job portal to integrate recruitment services through Facebook. The completely revamped shine.com was unveiled with the launch of this new integrated recruitment solution and the new campaign for this breakthrough product.

Hiring through social media, whilst once seen as nascent, has now reached mainstream recruitment as a credible tool in a savvy recruiter’s toolbox. 85% of Indian jobseekers use some or the other online social networking platforms for finding a job, and find both Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections useful in finding jobs.

The integration of Facebook for recruitment can be seen as a game-changing social recruitment platform. It means that recruiters will now be able to connect with the largely untapped set of jobseekers, most of which fall in the junior to mid-level hires. The Shine MyParichay social bar enables a recruiter to be able to reach out to the personal networks of their employees, match the skills and requirements to those in the extended network, and use the referral feature to connect with potential candidates.

To know more about the new shine.com and the strategic step forward, Adgully caught up with Amit Garg, Business Head, Internet Business, HT Media.

When asked about the enhancement of the product and the rationale behind it, Garg said, “Shine is a powerful product and with time we wanted to add more features to it hence with this entire integration of using social media we have created more reach for the students as well as for the recruiters.”

Speaking about the strengths of shine.com over the years and their efforts in maintaining the competitive edge, Garg said, “We strongly believe in the fact that until and unless your product is strong and user friendly you cannot attract eyeballs. We also wanted to focus on the fact that our product should be easily available and cater to the right TG.”

He says, “With Shine.com, HT Media has focused on recruiter needs and strived for innovative solutions that provides tremendous value in the recruitment industry. After our candidate database crossed the one crore mark and with two lakhs job openings on the site, we are now the world’s first job portal to integrate Facebook hiring solutions with our mainstream offering.”

“Our latest survey with candidates suggests that 65% of respondents are more likely to use Facebook over LinkedIn for job search – we now have a product that bridges this opportunity between recruiters and candidates. Our strong technological capabilities and a focused team working on integrating social media for recruitment have been instrumental in creating this unique product for this space, ” Garg added further.

Speaking about the marketing campaign, Garg said, “The moment we realized our strengths and the market needs we wanted to take our product in a much bigger way to our audience. We wanted to reach out through each and every channel we could. So we thought of scrutinizing each and every channel as per the needs and demands of their respective TGs.”

Elaborating further on the new campaign for this product, Rajan Bhalla, Group Marketing Head, HT Media Limited, said, “The communication challenge was to showcase, how the power of personal network can help you with your next job search and the campaign is crafted around this thought. The core proposition of ‘a friend can now help you get your next job’ is very simply articulated with the campaign idea of ‘Yaar Tu God Hai.’ It’s a story of two friends and the way one helps the other in getting his dream job through the Facebook network represented through a human pyramid and a high energy hummable song – Govinda Ala Re. This is a very different and refreshing new take on the category normally associated with boss bashing and quitting because of not being paid well enough. We are positive that this campaign will strike an emotional chord with both the candidates as well as the recruiter fraternity. This will be a multimedia campaign comprising TV, Print, Digital and unconventional media.”

About the plans going forward, Garg stressed upon the fact the focus would be more in strengthening the product for both recruiters and consumers.
Speaking about the job market he took us through some facts and said, “The job market has always been robust and will be. The overall economic scenario is said to be tough but recruiting and hiring does not stop anytime. The market sees ups and downs too but the hiring never stops.”

When asked to highlight the emerging job sectors, Garg replied,  “IT, insurance, sales and marketing.” While concluding he said, “The challenges in this field lie in terms of attracting correct people with right content. We have to cater to all sorts of need and demands given the fact poor infrastructure, low internet speeds etc.”

For information, Shine.com is India's 2nd largest job portal with database of over 1.2 crores candidate and over 200,000 job openings on site. It is built on a unique 2-way matching technology to deliver better relevance to both candidates and recruiters.