Despite sluggish economy, a jobs website sees rapid growth

Rozee.pk is visited by a quarter of Pakistan's internet population in 2010 and its revenue streams more than tripled.

KARACHI:

Few would have guessed that the idea of Pakistan’s largest job site; Rozee.pk was actually just a quick human resources solution for another venture that Monis Rahman was setting up.

Rahman’s idea for an online job site – which was supposed to provide him with employees for a matchmaking site that caters to Muslims around the world, naseebnetworks – snowballed into Rozee.pk as most job seekers know it today.

Rahman, the CEO and founder of the company, is proud of how Rozee.pk is a home grown indigenous Pakistani website. “Even the name and logo we chose reflects our pride in our origin,” he said, claiming that his site was dedicated to supplying Pakistani businesses with human capital to assist their economic growth.

Rahman’s Rozee.pk was visited by a quarter of the country’s Internet population in 2010 and its revenue streams have more than tripled since inception. While the company does not disclose revenue or profit number, Rahman says the website’s earnings have increased 488% over the last three years.

Online advertising revenue increased by about 1,200% during the same period, which Rahman says is a testament to the rapid growth and usage of the internet in Pakistan. He proudly mentions that the company, was designated as one of Pakistan’s fastest growing private companies by the AllWorld Network, affiliated with Professor Michael Porter at Harvard University.

In 2003, there were approximately four million internet users in the country, today we have about 20 million. “People in Pakistan are spending more time on the Internet than they are on any other medium and Rozee is using the internet to bring the job market to the people,” asserts Rahman.

Rozee.pk is an online platform that allows people to search for jobs and companies to search for employees. “Over 40,000 businesses, primarily in Pakistan, have posted jobs on our website that have been viewed by over 5.4 million professionals in 2010,” said Rahman.

Rozee.pk also provides employers with a CV Search engine, which is essentially similar to Google for 2.2 million CVs. Any skill, job title, company or keyword can be entered and the system find relevants CVs instantly.

“We statistically sample employers after the expiry date of their job postings and have discovered that our job placement rate is about 64%.  We estimate that we have placed approximately 150,000 professionals into jobs in Pakistan,” said Rahman.

The company is able to do this on a massive scale due to their online platform, which Rahman says, auto-processes and auto-matches applicants based upon specified criteria.

According to him, “the self-serve platform is easy to use and accessible from anywhere with Internet connectivity.” Due to its scale, the Rahman claims that his job site offers both small businesses and large employers with unprecedented value at highly affordable prices.

“The technology allows powerful filtering and thus merit rises to the top. This has helped equalise the job market and efficiencies have been created for the ecosystem,” said Rahman. “The website allows professionals to calculate where their salary levels should be based on the massive amounts of data we have.”

According to Rahman, prior to the aggregation and availability of this information, there were very large deviations in compensation levels for similar positions at different companies.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd,  2011.