Quikr zooms in on Naukri

Quikr.com has launched a new TV campaign which focuses on one of the most popular service categories on the website - jobs. The objective, as per the company, is to position Quikr as a great place to look for jobs in various sectors.

Job ads have always been a part of classified advertisements on print. The advancement in technology has evolved advertising into various other forms of communication and since everything is going online these days, free classified ads are no different.

Job searches, too, have found their individual abode on the internet, with many businesses in India and abroad being built around the vertical of job advertisements only, including successful ventures such as Naukri.com and Monster.com.

Classifieds sites, on the other hand, have not done away with the jobs section either. Global classified advertising website Craigslist has famously given nightmares to leading job portals like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com with its job listings.

Along the same lines, Indian online classifieds company Quikr.com has launched a new TV campaign which focuses on one of the most popular service categories on the website, jobs. The objective, as per the company, is to position Quikr as a great place to look for jobs in various sectors. The campaign has been conceptualised by Scarecrow Communications and the ad has been directed by Naren Multani.

The film features a man walking into a jeans shop. There, he encounters a shop assistant who tells him about three different kinds of jeans in three different voices. The man tells the assistant that since he has a flair for such good voices, he should be working in a call centre instead of a jeans shop. The shop assistant asks how he can get into a call centre (in a fourth voice), on which the man mentions Quikr as a great place to find jobs.

This is followed by the product window which talks about the new Resume Builder feature on the website that helps construct an impressive resume and ends with the signature Quikrrrr audio mnemonic. Television, radio and the internet will be used extensively to promote this campaign.

A new positioning?

Classified ads have always been perceived as a great way to list items, services, or properties for sale. Now for a classified portal to advertise itself as a job listing site might influence the way the positioning of the website is perceived.

However, Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quikr, says this ad will expand the positioning of Quikr instead of changing it. "The commercial is intended to make people aware of the existing categories that Quikr.com offers services on. Jobs have been a primary part of Quikr and it is one of the most visited sections of the site. People who are already on the internet know about Quikr jobs, and hence with the new ad we wanted to reach the people who are beyond the internet world and make them aware of the service," Chulet adds.

Along with the jobs TVC, the company has also released TVCs about mobile phones and cars to help promote the typical classified services of the portal, which is important as close competitor OLX launched a high decibel campaign to promote itself as a used goods selling platform.

With an oblique reference to the competitor, Chulet says it is very fashionable these days to ask people to go to any '.com' and sell unused stuff but the major thing that matters is the traffic, listings and transactions.

"We lead the market with a share of 65 per cent and the next competitor holds about 35 per cent of the market. Listings and revenue wise we are bigger than any other player in the Indian market," he informs.

As per comScore numbers for September 2013, Quikr gets around 14 million unique visitors in a month. Meanwhile, OLX had around 10 million total unique visitors for the month. Quikr has a claimed listing of 14 million posts.However, the average time spent per visit on OLX is 6.3 minutes and on Quikr is 2.9 minutes.

"Household goods, cars, real estate, jobs, services and education are the highest traffic grossing sections on Quikr. Out of all these, we have never spoken about our jobs feature in a TVC and we thought it was a good time to do that and let people know that Quikr is not just about products," informs Chulet.

Battling the giants

Naukri.com famously built its brand with the iconic Hari Sadu commercials. Other job portals have followed suit and have invested heavily on TV advertising, with Shine.com and Monster.com being the foremost runners in the category. Will it be easy for Quikr to directly challenge the category leaders of online jobs in India?

The Naukri.com site as of Q2, 2013 boasts of 35 million CVs. In total, the site serviced 27,000 unique employers in the quarter. Meanwhile, as of June 2013, Shine.com claimed to have 1.2 crore registered candidates on its database.

The conventional model of current job portals is that jobseekers post their CVs online and companies pay these portals for advertising, job listing and searching databases. However, on a classifieds site like Quikr, job listings will majorly be free unless the advertiser wants the listing to be featured as a 'Top of page Ad' and an 'Urgent Ad'. Top of the page ads appear at the top of job listing page whereas Urgent Ads come with a star mark that symbolises the urgency in filling up the vacancy.

Chulet however sounds optimistic while saying that Quikr has an added advantage over any vertical specific player in terms of traffic. "Due to our other popular services, we have built a very strong user base which is also very loyal. Thus we have very good chance to compete with the leaders in the online jobs category," he adds.

He further explains that rather than competing with the category leaders, Quikr is focusing more on expanding the jobs category in the country by promoting different types of jobs which are not usually featured on popular job portals.

"The bigger players typically have big companies listing their expensive openings with them. We are positioning ourselves as a service for the mid-and-junior level job requirements. There are a lot of mid-level and freshers, especially in the sectors of IT, BPO, retail and sales, who face difficulty in finding a suitable job for themselves as most of the jobs listed online fall in the senior category. Likewise, start-ups who are looking at employing efficient people but can't find the interested candidate can also be benefited from our service. After all, the market needs smaller employers and smaller employees as well, and we are promoting Quikr as a place for them," comments Chulet.

Quikr was launched in 2008 and is currently present in 900 cities across India. Quikr provides the local community with a platform to help them buy, sell, rent and find something across many categories like mobiles, real estate, cars, services, jobs, entertainment, furniture and electronics. The company is backed by Matrix Partners India, Omidyar Network, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay Inc.