Interview with Maneck Mohan, Recruit.net Founder

We recently reviewed Recruit.net, a job search engine for the Asia Pacific regions of the world. Maneck Mohan, founder of Recruit.net took some time to chat with me about his product. We also discuss where the job search engine is going, what it's like to operate a startup in China and what words of wisdom he has for the rest of us. Check out the interview below.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Maneck: My background is in tech recruitment. I've run a technology recruitment company catering to the needs of Fortune 100 companies in Asia Pacific for the last 15 years. Part of the motivation for launching Recruit.net was to build a new service geared entirely to the needs of the individual job seeker.

Allen: What is Recruit.net?

Maneck: Recruit.net is a search engine like Google but we only search the jobs listings.

We cover multiple countries and are fully trilingual (English, Chinese, Japanese) We currently operate search engines in China, Japan, Australia, India, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Allen: How does the service work?

Maneck: We have built very smart web spiders that crawl the world wide web looking for job listings. When we find suitable job content we index a summary of the data like the job title, description and location. We currently have around 3 millions jobs in our index all from the last 30 days. Our sources include job sites, newspapers, online classifieds and corporate career pages.

Allen: What's the team like at Recruit.net?

Maneck: Our team is 85% software engineers. We're essentially a bunch of geeks.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Maneck: There is no other international service we know of that provides a comprehensive job search engine across multiple countries and languages. We do however compete on a country to country basis with other services, for example Yahoo! India and REDIFF (a Nasdaq listed portal) operate vertical job search engines for India and Chinese search engine KooXoo has some scale in the China job market.

Allen: Do you compete with SimplyHired and Indeed?

Maneck: We don't operate job search engines in their markets.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details?

Maneck: We have steady revenue streams and are on target to be cash flow positive end of Q3 2007. Our monetization is via our pay-per-click advertising system ADNET - details are here. Basically advertising on Recruit.net is not limited to jobs, it's applicable to all types of companies looking to promote their online services to our users.

Allen: What's coming in the next 3-6 months for Recruit.net? Any plans to expand internationally into the U.S.?

Maneck: In the next 3-6 months our focus is very much on what we call "Job syndication" it's about syndicating or distributing job content across multiple partner web sites to reach passive job seekers as opposed to only active job seekers who visit job sites.

We are doing this by building up international distribution networks such as this new channel for ZDNET Asia.

In terms of entering the US market we have been approached by some US based companies for partnerships. It's still early stages so for the time being our focus is very much on developing our existing core markets.

Allen: Where do you see recruiting sites moving this year?

Maneck: I think the trend globally is for companies to use more sophisticated Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) which integrate tightly with their corporate career sites; so companies are now more interested in driving job seeker traffic directly to their web sites and encouraging applicants to apply online. This allows companies to closely monitor and track the recruitment process and to measure their cost per hire and ROI.

Allen: Why should a person use an aggregator like your vs. working directly with the recruiting and company job web sites?

Maneck: A job seeker should use both. We are not a replacement for recruiting and company web sites. We are merely the starting point. In the same when you do a search on Google you ultimately end up on the site that has the content you are looking for. Our value proposition to job seekers is that we provide a fast and simple way to search, track and filter millions of jobs from thousands of sources across the web.

Allen: What's the web market like in China?

Maneck: The web market in China is a bit like the wild west, full of great opportunity and very much up for grabs. The general operating mentality is also very different from the US.

Consider the fact that on Baidu, China's leading search engine you will often get up to the first 3 pages of popular search results comprised entirely of paid advertiser listings that are not identified as ads and look identical to their organic search results!

Even up until today, the major US internet players have had a hard time cracking the China market. Google with all their might and limitless resources cannot win search market share from Baidu. In fact in many of China's outlying cities users have never heard of Google.

Also remember that Yahoo! recently threw in the towel and sold out their China business to local operator and partner Alibaba.com for US$ 1 Billion.

China presents a huge opportunity for web applications, but you need to be mindful of the regulatory issues, censorship concerns, and the general nuances of doing business in China.

Allen: What advice do you have for those thinking about starting a web application or web business in China?

Maneck: My view is that opportunities are there for the taking, so go for it, but spend time on the ground in China, find a reliable local partner, and run the enterprise as a business, which means from the beginning you need to think about monetization and the challenges you face such as limited consumer credit card reach and the lack of a mature online payment systems.

Allen: Do you see the same types of expansion that we do in the U.S.?

Maneck: Consider that in the US 80% of the Fortune 500 only accept job applications online. In Asia this number is still below 25%. We are far behind in transitioning from traditional offline job postings such as print, newspapers, etc. to online internet job postings, but it is happening and it's happening fast, so from this perspective alone the opportunity for us is huge.

It's also widely reported that China will overtake the US soon to become the world's largest internet market. It's estimated that the number of broadband subscribers in China is growing at around 79% annually.

Allen: What's been your biggest lesson learned since you started Recruit.net?

Maneck: I would say be ready to roll with the punches. Press on. Never give up. There is an old Japanese proverb we quote on our web site which sums this up nicely:

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."- Japanese Proverb