We are a recruitment company where we help companies hire. We have a total of 2000+ clients across India. Our social media presence is as below (all organic)
LinkedIn followers: Have 190k , 59k followers on LinkedIn (Brand, Parent Organisation respectively)
Facebook groups: Approx 25 location specific niche Facebook groups with ~3L Job-seekers
WhatsApp groups: Approx 30-40 different categories of niche groups with ~12-13k members
We have build our own ERP that acts as a marketplace between Job-seekers & Employers by acting as a Job-portal. The web portal also has specific roles and access that allows internal recruiters, business development team to generate and manage their leads
Our database
Business Development
~1.29L leads researched 1:1 by Business Development team
Additional database of 55k researched via tools such as Lusha, Apollo etc.
Recruitment
79,025 Job-seekers registered on our website
13,173 employers/recruitment companies registered on our website
3,08,482 registered by Recruiters on our website
Chronology of development as a company
Burnt cash in 2014-16
Build the first version of our website: 2017. Became profitable in our 1st city
Reinvested profits to grow to 3 states. No profit/no loss in 2018
Revenue of last 3 FY is as below
FY 21-22: 24L
FY 2022-23: 78L (Approx 100,000$)
FY 23-24: ~60L (Estimated)
Revenue insights (Approximate)
~80% of our revenue came from IT roles and ~20% from non-IT
~40% of our revenue would have come from metros and ~60% from non-metros
Client stickiness (Data from last 4 years)
Billing for clients with only 1 invoice cleared till date: 54L
Billing for clients with only 2 invoice cleared till date: 47L
Billing for clients with only 3 invoice cleared till date: 25L
Billing for clients with only 4 invoice cleared till date: 11L
Billing for clients with only 5+ invoice cleared till date: 36L
@ihlf Can you share your estimated profits in the last three years?
Apart from that here are my observations -
1. This business is not going anywhere and an acceptable exit would be to hope that some of the big boys would end up acquiring you. But that's not going to happen since there's no moat.
2. You are providing a service for now. Perhaps of you can show attribution for your web traffic channela to revenues and that without any manual intervention - then we have a story
3. 2000 clients and very low repeat billing numbers. Do you have folks working on client success?
This is a lifelong business that will run as long as you are running it. It works and it's a highly fragmented space. Lekin commodity hai without any real differentiation.
Dont think they account for any meaningful revenue (except adsense on the blog)
No, don't have that function altogether in the company. It adds to an additional cost and I am not sure if the business can afford it at this point. Do you think otherwise?
Margin is decent but the Cash Flow cycle is pretty fucked up. Scaling only leads the business to be more starved for cash.
Recruitment Services: We help clients with their hiring requirements. Mostly 8.33% of annual CTC of the selected candidate. For example, if we close a mid-level Laravel Developer role in Ahmedabad at 6LPA, we will be paid ~50k for the placement. Payment typically happens within 45-60 days of candidate joining
Approx 100 placements in 2021, 185 in 2022, ~150 in 2023 (Calendar Year)
@jesuslover07 i am curious about the same . how are they functioning and how a good candidate is selected. i know the hard technique of just interviewing them and keeping them on hold until a client comes looking for them but it requires HR resources.
@jesuslover07 Only 1 painpoint. Lack of profitability & Cashflow
Since majority of our clients were IT services, this has taken a hit during the ongoing IT crisis. Also, SMEs have taken a hit and it has had a snowball effect on our business. Some of our clients are unable to pay salaries to their employees and have naturally not paid us. Some of them are cutting corners after taking the services
We were solving talent discovery problem for SMEs. Ideally, more the chaos, the better it is for a Recruitment company since an average founder will need help to find the talent from various sourcing channels. A single big player hurts the Recruitment Services industry. Naukri was the biggest player 5 years back but it failed to eliminate other players. Now that LinkedIn has democratised talent discovery, the long term prospects of the industry in general are slightly dull.
Working Capital: You buy portal subscriptions year in advance, recruiter puts in the effort in a month and the revenue hits the bank account 4/5 months later
Consistency in revenue: There is no-retainer model. It is like a jungle and you need to hunt daily to survive.
About building portals
Haha. I think that is even tougher. This is a media business where the winner takes all. With the big boys fighting it out (LinkedIn, Indeed, Naukri), smaller players will have an even tougher time. Cutshort and Internshala have both considered getting into service business because that is where the $$ lies. If you can build a niche, it is a different story altogether (Instahyre, hirist, iimjobs)
IMHO, Every flipkart eventually realises that the money is to build/sell its own brand and to control the delivery.
@ihlf Dude, me with my single team with single client used to generate 100/Hr with a single client when i used to work and its prettty recent like 2 years ago....also as far as india goes our single client used to give us like 200-300 req/month , anyone with a similar industry background will catch you...2000 plus client (Not sure who are you counting as clients) and im not sure wym by invoices cleared ..you didnt mentioned the number of positons you closed per month/ quarterly etc... Having followers is good but it doesnt matter if you are not able to capitalise on that...havent you heard about that story of an influencer with 2m followers but wasnt able to sell 36 t shirts when she started her business.....Not everyone will get fooled by numbers..Also i would like to take a guess that this company is work india
@ihlf Dont worry scope bahot tagda hai ismee , you neeed to perform a proper audit of your current operations and strategy and do like a relaunch or something ...Again i hope you are not Workindia because that company needs to go asap!!!
@ihlf Amazing numbers , monetization and business model can be improved to increase overall revenues. I m curious about the traffic part, which has huge opportunity for growth. The biggest opportunity for you is building some service/product which sells immediately and shorten the revenue cycle. Ex. AI resume scanner, resume APIs , candidate lifecycle management platform , 360 degree RaaS product. Btw what's your team size and operating profits
