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 22nd, 2011.
COMMENTS (19)
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A well researched article with great accompanying info graphics. Although many do say that Rozee.pk is geared more towards the info-tech sector, it can't be denied that it is also one of the success stories of Pakistani business - Monis Rahman has turned a vision into credible and practical reality and that is something that should always be inspirational to many. Yasmin Malik, Visiting Faculty, IBA
Fantastic! We need more stories similar to Rozee's.
Great data and interesting growth for one of our new economy pioneers. Good to see Tribune covering innovative businesses other than traditional old economy sectors. The sad thing is that Forbes covered this before any of our local media, but kudos Tribune for picking it up.
What have monster, naukri, gulftalent and bayt done for Pakistanis? Exactly: nothing. We need our local heros to launch successful business ventures who don't go running home whenever a bomb goes off or the economy seems shaky. Facilitating 150,000 hires is no joke, multiply that by an average household size of five -- great stuff. Rozee executed where others failed. I'm a huge fan of what Mr. Rahman has achieved.
Great coverage and research by the Tribune team on an inspirational local story. I remember reading about US venture capital funds investing for the first time in Pakistan when they invested in Rozee. I felt optimistic then and now am even more encouraged about the online sector in Pakistan after seeing Rozee's subsequent financial success. Online businesses can flourish and become sustainable in Pakistan. This is a huge inflection point.
What makes the Rozee story so special is that it is the first online property to scale and become highly financially successful in a local context. This is the real innovation. We tend to glamorize international brands. The local successes are what we need to be super proud of. Hats off!
Hits to job websites are bound to increase in sluggish economy, isnt that obvious?
Nothing special about Rozee.pk. Its just a normal website. Its seeing growth despite a sluggish economy is quite a subjective term. This article seems to be a PR thing and nothing else. Disappointed to see tribune's standards going down!
With all the joblessness people click the site a thousand time a day in hope of a miracle or in desperation about their jobless state.
Misleading title. Rozee.pk is heavily biased towards web/mobile development jobs. Since this is a hot job sector around the world now, Rozee.pk is seeing more traffic. It's nothing to do with the country's overall economy. Even in the stagnated economies of Europe and Japan, internet/mobile sector is booming.
Nothing new, just a copy of well known websites from around the world who are the pioneers... Monster.com, naukri.com etc. All these sites invented online job recruiting, now just copy and paste.
Hardly anything to be proud of.
Rozee is nothing, all is drama
hats off
What about Linkedin ??
Keep up the good work.
There is a pretty cool infographic accompanying this article in today's print edition. Must see!
Great writeup on a wonderful Pakistani entrepreneurial success story. It's good to see local media finally covering tech stories also featured in the international media. Monis and Rozee were also recently featured in the US edition of Forbes Magazine: link text
Well done and inspirational story.
Rozee.pk is indeed a good sign for Pakistan's comming generation. we all should be proud of it.