Sending across resumes was never so easy, never so swift. Blame it on SMSresume.com if there's any drop in job seekers queuing their curriculum vitae through email. In February, the small Hyderabad-based company, assimilated mobile technology and Internet, facilitating job seekers to send their resumes through a text message. The idea is simple and innovative, register for free at its website, upload your resume on the website. Now, if you want to send a resume to any prospective employer, just send the desired email address, as an SMS to 3030. Presto! Your resume will be sent to the email address as an MS Word attachment, what more from your very own email ID.

Sreenivas Chennamaneni, CEO, SMSresume.com, is ready to plunge deep into the online recruitment industry. In a tête-à-tête with Kishore Kumar from CyberMedia News, he speaks about the concept and future plans of SMSresume.com. Excerpts:

What is the technology behind this innovation?
The whole project was developed in PHP with backed database MySQL. We deployed Apache web server. PHP is widely used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It has mailing features integrated with the server. Making use of all the PHP features we have implemented our concept with these technologies and achieved success. My brother Suman, he came up with the idea of such integration last year and we started working on it.

In a country where PC and Internet penetration is low, whereas mobile market is growing steadily, what are your views on the success of the service?
The statistics tell the whole story. Mobile usage as grown drastically as compared to the PC market. Even if the PC and Internet penetration increased at the same rate, it can't really compare with the convenience of using a mobile that is so very handy and ubiquitous. We are betting big on mobile technology.

What other services are being planned by SMSresume.com? How has been the growth and what are the revenues?
We are planning to provide services in human resources domain, like recruitment, consulting and staffing. We would like to start a job portal which will come with job alerts. We are also planning to offer workforce management services. We are looking at other options, which can run with the integration of mobile, and Internet technology.

But that will pit you against the two behemoths of online recruitment, namely, Naukri & Monster, who have solely dominated the online recruitment industry. Do you think you could break their stranglehold?
We have already one up with the innovation. We are working on various concepts, which would pave the path for further innovations.

As there are no registration charges, what is your revenue model?
We share the revenue with the provider of the short code service (3030). We generate some revenues from banners and advertisements. We are planning to sell the space on SMS confirmation. This would be huge as per our expectations. In the future we would be try a few more things.

How many people have registered for the services? What are your estimates?
The number of people who have registered is above 2000. This has been within a period of one-and-half month. So that is an average of 50 registrations per day. We are expecting a massive growth once we launch our online ad campaign and our job portal, which would come with job alerts as a bonus. We are still working on the business model. We are looking at massive growth in the coming six months. We are looking at 50,000 registrations in the next six months. This is definitely high but pretty much possible and we are confident of reaching the target.

Why haven't you launched this service in a big way?
We had actually planned it in a bigger way. As this tool is the first-of-its-kind, we thought to give it some time and understand how it works. Looking at the response we have received so far, we are planning to promote it in a bigger way. We are seeking support from major banks. We are also looking out for investors.

Big players are ready to offer similar services. Naukri has recently launched InstaHire, which works on the mobile platform. How do you intend to survive the competition?
We are ready and confident to survive with the business model we are following. We are pretty sure that all big players want their customers to come online and clicks count for them. But we are providing a service which doesn't need a person to come to the Internet or click on the website. I think this is not encouraging for all the big players to enter this market because their revenue is from clicks and online visitors. SMSresume.com was launched in early February whereas Instahire was launched a few days back. It is a different concept. We think that we would be able to survive the competition and we are ready to compete with anybody who will offer similar services because we are working on lot of other products which would be useful for both the recruiters and the jobseekers.

Since this service has been offered for the first time in the world, are you looking at taking it globally?
This is one thing that we had in our minds from the very first day we planned to take off this project. We are almost done with the project reports and we are planning to go online by June with two countries. We have also signed the contracts with few more countries. Some others are in the row and we are discussing the feasibility of the project in those countries. The support from our partners in these countries has been encouraging.

Email This   Print This   Comments   RSS