The India, Southeast Asia and West Asia businesses of Monster Worldwide, the parent company, are owned by business services provider Quess Corp. Only these three businesses will be rebranded to foundit.
The rebrand has been in the works since Quess took over Monster, but was delayed due to the pandemic among other reasons.
“The job requirements are changing faster than ever. The skills required for a job change almost every year. If you look at a job posting last year against one this year, the requirements have changed," said Sekhar Garisa, chief executive of foundit.
“Today even when you hire a HR manager, you need to be sure that they can use certain kinds of tools."
Garisa said the revamped platform will provide more new-age offerings like LinkedIn, using its existing databases to make recommendations to customers.
“We want to transform from a data-based company to a data company. Job boards have always been data-based, meaning you have a large mass of data and you run some search queries on it. A data company, however, treats data like its engine," said Garisa.
Foundit will use AI-based recommendations to serve jobs and also curate prospective candidates for recruiters. The company also wants to provide personalized services like mock interviews and prep materials. It will also take user-generated content like resumes and supplement it with information available elsewhere like LinkedIn, Github etc. Garisa added that the company also aims to make its AI explainable to ensure that users retain control over the jobs they see.
For instance, while the platform’s algorithms will recommend jobs, the user will also be able to see the keywords it is basing the recommendations on, and will be able to remove ones that they find irrelevant.
The revamp comes at a time when companies like Monster and Quess are experiencing a pressure on bottomlines due to slowdown in IT and ITES hiring across the world. Revenues for Quess’ IT staffing and selection business, which usually reports margins of 13-17% and accounts for 7-8% of its core earnings, halved, according to quarterly earnings reports filed by the company earlier this month.
Ajit Isaac, Non-Executive Chairman of Quess and Monster.com, said BFSI accounted for the largest constituency of hiring in the last quarter, and is expected to grow. He also said that consumer and retail hiring should help fuel demand, while the IT/ITES sectors are “about two quarters" away from picking up again.
“It’s not like hiring has slowed down across sectors," said Garisa. “The scarcity of top talent is still visible," he said adding that natural attrition alone accounts for a large number of hirings even now.
