Recruit.net Revamp Lets You Ping Friends About Their Jobs

Recruit.net just rebuilt its site and underlying engine, in the hopes of attracting new users. The job search site is an aggregator pulling listings from job databases and individual job listings on corporate sites.

This is how it hopes to differentiate from larger competitors like Monster and JobStreet, which display listings that companies have specifically taken out on the job sites themselves.

Recruit.net’s Hong Kong-based founder, Maneck Mohan, said the revamp was done in order to make the backend search quicker, and so that the site can keep users coming to it. He said Recruit.net attracts about 500 new sign-ups and spits out results for about a million job searches done per day. It has a database of a million registered users right now.

With the revamp, the site is also launching a feature called Social Connections, which allows users to “discreetly” find contacts and friends of friends, up to second-degree connections, that work at specific companies. With the feature enabled, job searches will show relevant social connections underneath job ads, and you can message contacts about those jobs in order to find out more.

It doesn’t compete with social networks like LinkedIn (which also relies on recruitment as a revenue pillar). Recruit.net uses both LinkedIn and Facebook APIs to “supplement” its social layer, and any contact with users found is done on their sites, said Mohan.

LinkedIn has over 200 million members as of end-2012, and reported that over half of its revenue of $304 million in the fourth quarter last year came from the company’s Talent Solutions business. This includes the company’s recruitment business, as it tries to become the go-to place for job seekers.

recruit.net 2013

The new revamp showing popular companies with job openings

Recruit.net was created in 2006 as a side project for Mohan, who was working at Morgan Stanley before setting up a recruitment consultancy business catering to IT professionals. He hired two developers four-and-a-half years ago for Recruit.net, and decided to tend to the project full-time about ten months ago. Mohan and his current team of eight are in Hong Kong.

The site relies on sponsored listings for revenue, with pay-per-clicks at US$0.40 (S$0.50), and partner sites paying US$0.81 (S$1) for people to register and submit resumes to them.