Want to change your job? Now you can also try 'ChangeYourBoss'
This conversation’s context is in the days when people used to join companies and retire from the same with a golden watch. When Bhupender Mehta was changing his first job, he told his father, only to find him shocked at his bold decision. His father could not believe this and asked him if he was serious about leaving his job. Bhupender has found a better option and a better offer but his father just could not understand. He said, “You have just completed 5 years, I am working for my organization for last 25 years. I don’t know how are you going to survive.”
Bhupender has done a pretty good job with his career, changing jobs, or more rightly said –changing the boss. After all, people join companies but leave their managers. Today, after 17 years of HR experience, Bhupender has started up ‘ChangeYourBoss’ for helping employees who are looking to do so. With CYB, Bhupender is in a market filled with established players like Monster, Naukri, TimesJobs etc but he is banking on the corporate-college integration in his plans to change the face of job search in India.
Bhupender started his career with human resources. When he joined, the outlook towards people working in HR was very different and he has seen the transition in the industry very closely. He shares that HR people were the ones who had back entry to the office, who used to sit next to security guards’ desks and manage employee records. In 1996, when he moved in HR, it was the time when more encounters with the western part of the world started to happen. Lot of joint ventures were happening, a lot of western companies tried to come to India and then the industry realized that if we had to compete in western part of the world, human resources departments were very important. All of a sudden HR was given immense importance.
It was the time when people started moving away from personnel management to human resources in true sense. Absconding was a word which nobody had heard of within the industries which were railing up at that point of time in India. “When I started working for an IT company, for the first time I was hearing my colleagues saying, ‘You know somebody absconded from the services’. If you say today that my attrition rate is about 30% monthly or 80% annually, people won’t give you an eye browser,” says Bhupender.
Around the same time, dotcom bubble was happening in India and job portals were one of the first things to come up. Bhupender went ahead and joined as one of the first few core team members in JobsAhead (now Monster India). Also, working for IT companies over years, he has seen disgruntled people on both sides of the job table. Bhupender says, “Employers are saying there is no talent and the talent says there are no jobs. And that’s the reason ChangeYourBoss came in to picture - to start something simple just like matching the mismatch. For doing this we are going to engage the corporate world, not only in terms of coming out to advertise their positions but also to work with the educational institutions in redesigning their entire curriculum according to the job markets. I feel even till date the complete portal experience is missing from any of the jobs sites.”
He co-founded CYB along with Sanjay Singh and has been working on the product for the last one year. They are a team of 35 today based out of Delhi and they launched CYB beta in the end of July this year. He shares that currently in beta, they have over 150 employers and 30,000+ job seekers. The differentiating factor for CYB will be the intelligent user behavior analysis based on which smart and customized suggestions for jobs will be given, candidate services including guidance for skills improvement, writing effective resumes, presenting oneself well for an interview etc.
Currently CYB does not stand out in anything different from other job sites except that it is much cleaner in design and easier to navigate. Also, they have a ‘Stress Free Tools’ section which has stress buster games for job seekers and one game is aptly named as ‘Kick Your Boss’. CYB is looking at subscription based revenue model from the corporate and a service based payment model for candidates (only for additional services like credentials verification, resume building etc.). Bhupender says that they will be moving towards the integration of the corporate world and institution with what they are calling ‘freshers lounge’ in a couple of months and keeping the portal clean and clutter-less will always be one of their top priorities and differentiators in the future.
If you are looking out to be ‘boss-less’, visit our jobs board and find yourself a startup job!
