myNoticePeriod.com raises Rs 18 cr from IDG Ventures

New Delhi: myNoticePeriod.com is certainly not the regular job portal. For one, it has nothing for you unless you have resigned and are already serving notice period in your current job. This is unlike the big daddies of this industry, naukri.com or monster.com etc, where anyone can upload a CV and then get recommendations on possible job openings. Since the criterion is that you must have already resigned from your job, myNoticePeriod.com also presumes you obviously have at least one new job offer ready so that a competitive counter offer can be made by a prospective recruiter.[caption id=“attachment_2093365” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Screenshot from mynoticeperiod.com website[/caption] CEO Manjunath Talwar and co-founder Abhijit Khasnis have been long-time associates, having worked together at several companies including Yahoo. It was at Yahoo that the two decided to team up to start a job portal which would address the hiring concerns of the IT and BPO industry. Talwar told Firstpost IT product companies do not typically have a bench strength - employees benched till a new project comes up - unlike the big guns such as Wipro or Infosys which have 4,000-5,000 employees on the bench at any given time. So if a project came up, the product companies would look to quickly hire skilled manpower but there was a huge problem - people first had to be approached, negotiations would ensue, they would have to then resign from current jobs and then serve notice periods. In short, there was little possibility of quick hiring of talent because this process could take anywhere from four-six months. This was hurting project deliveries. “We decided to launch something to address this huge concern of the IT and BPO industry in 2013. We only invested Rs 10 lakh to set up the portal but then quit Yahoo and began getting involved full time with this by April last year,” Talwar said. Within a few months, IDG and a couple of angel investors lined up about Rs 2 crore seed funding and the portal got its own office. Since then, myNoticePeriod.com has got 400 paying clients (recruiters across IT/BPO, Finance and Retail sectors) and its second round of funding of Rs 18 crore from IDG Ventures earlier this week. Talwar pointed out that existing job portals do not capture things like “how soon can a candidate join, what is the best offer this candidate already has. Which is why we restricted out search to those already serving notice periods. But we are expanding and will soon allow others to also get searched on the site”. This means anyone actively looking out to change the present job will soon be included in Talwar’s list of candidates. But this will also be done with a few benchmarks - each candidate’s profile will be removed after a specified period, the portal will look at core skills only instead of allowing searches on all skills mentioned in a candidate’s CV. And despite the rapid growth in the portal’s business, Talwar said there won’t be any job listings as of now. Only recruiters can at present search the site for their needs, job seekers can only post their details and await calls from recruiters. myNoticePeriod.com has seen a 10 fold growth in job seekers and two fold month over month growth in recruiters. Talwar claimed that myNoticPeriod.com has grown to become India’s largest recruitment startup in just a year and with the latest round of funding, “we have managed the fastest seed-to-series fund raise (just four months) in this space”. He said the portal already has patents in the USA and in India so that no one else can replicate the idea or start another similar venture. IDG Ventures has invested in several other e-commerce ventures such as Flipkart, Yatra, Lenskart, Firstcry and Zivame. Venkatesh Peddi of IDG Ventures said in a statement: “We are very convinced with the company’s vision of enabling faster hiring…..The platform is witnessing exponential growth and we are very happy to be part of the company.” The fresh funding coming in will be used to expand technological prowess of myNoticePeriod.com besides quadrupling manpower from 30 people at present. Talwar said as of now, candidates with an average experience of up to six years and between 6-10 years make up 30 percent each of the business on the portal.