No more does it sound idealistic as JobeeHive, a unique user-generated employer review website launched by Vishwas Mudagal makes it possible. Aimed at enabling professionals and students to research employers and salaries through employer reviews, ratings & salary reports, the BETA version of the website launched in September 2008 has already seen over 20,000 reviews being submitted by employees.
The service enables current or ex-employees to rate/review companies anonymously to help other users know the inside dope – job offers, announcements, business opportunities and more. Much like a social networking site, it helps users to leverage the platform to interact with diverse industry professionals.
Explains Vishwas, “JobeeHive.com was started to provide to users, valuable information for making informed career decisions which was otherwise not accessible. We have taken an innovative approach by publishing employer reviews and ratings submitted by employees themselves – because employees know the best about an employer.”
That perhaps explains why 200,000+ professionals have researched employers & salaries on JobeeHive.com with 1+ million hits since January 2009. All this without spending a single penny on marketing; informs Vishwas who believes that their growth has been purely viral.
Given the employee submitted reviews of companies, the website is also turning out to be a great tool for employers to gauge genuine feedback and compare themselves with the competition and the industry so also to communicate back to professionals, hire talent and build a good brand.
A win-win model for both employees and employers, JobeeHive.com is uniquely positioned in the job market as a service which compliments job sites & generic professional networks.
An optimistic Vishwas says “The market size for JobeeHive is as big as the job market itself because anyone who needs a job needs to research about the profile and compensation. Market leaders in the online job market have nearly 16+million users, so we have a huge potential to scale up.”
The service is free for users and Vishwas hopes to monetize the content to earn revenues through premium services, corporate subscriptions, recruitment and branding solutions.
JobeeHive.com works on a ‘give-and-take’ model where in order to view reviews and salaries submitted by other employees, the user has to submit a review or salary report of his own from a current or previous employer, which the team informs is done to keep the employer information fresh and accurate. Moderation of every submitted review or salary before publishing is also another effort undertaken to ensure quality information for users although it has resulted into tremendous workload on the current team of nine members and a huge backlog of reviews in the moderation pipeline.
“We are looking at raising funds through various options to scale up the team. However to convince people that such a service would actually work was very difficult initially. Today we have users who have liked our service and been our brand ambassadors and hence have proved our critics wrong” says the proud founder.
With the recent launch of the US version of JobeeHive.com already giving 5-10% of the total traffic from USA, the team is now looking at targeting specific international markets although they maintain that their core focus will remain India.
By all evidence, the growth trajectory of this company has been tremendous, and Vishwas attributes it to the fact that their service is solving a need and also to the way their plans have been executed. “Reaching 200000 page views a month, crossing 20,000 reviews, having 50,000 registered users, these small number achievements remind us of being on the right track.”
With this kind of attention, it was natural that employers listen to JobeeHive more willingly than before now. “From CEOs to HR folks doing rounds of JobeeHive.com, we get on an average of 2 calls every week from companies across the world wanting to see what employees are saying about them and to manage their brands. It is difficult to ignore now what has been written on JobeeHive.”
As company reviews and salary reports on JobeeHive.com get tens of thousands of hits every week, the content keeps growing and depending on the market demand, the team adds new features like the Layoff Tracker where employees can report and keep track of industry layoffs.
One knows then that this pioneer concept in the niche employer review segment in India has hit the right spot, being named in the Top 10 Indian Technology Startups in February 2009 featured in DARE Magazine and also among the Top 1000 ideas selected by Economic Times for The Power of Ideas contest.
“I think some people are born to be entrepreneurs. Having started my first company at 18 years – InfoVision to train rural students in computers, I have experimented with ideas and learnt very valuable lessons. Even my stint in a corporate job got me global and national recognition for my work of setting up new processes. So, you can say that entrepreneurship is in my blood and whatever I do in my life I would be entrepreneurial and iconoclastic in my ways” says Vishwas exuding a confidence as characteristic to someone who knows he’s built a successful enterprise.
The young man however remains grounded knowing that entrepreneurship is all about ups and downs, a lot of pain but not without satisfaction and pleasure. “One has to be agile, awake and aggressive. At one point in time, I jumped on to an opportunity without proper research of the market, the business model etc and soon ran out of steam. Also, I didn’t understand the intricacies of partnerships and learnt the hard way that the team which you put together matters a lot as executing well is winning it.”
He urges aspiring entrepreneurs by saying that the pride in inspiring people to dream of something big and achieve it is unmatched and reinforces that the journey towards success is more rewarding than success itself. It is exactly what drives him too – to innovate and make services that impact multitudes creates financial value for the stakeholders.
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