We must have come across a lot of inspirational stories and the story of Sanjeev Bikhchandani is one that will drive you a lot. He is the owner of Naukri.com- which is now a popular Indian job portal. Let’s find out how he quit a job and ended up enjoying his own success with Naukri.com.
Sanjeev holds a BA in Economics from Delhi University, he studied there even as he had qualified for IIT. IIT-JEE is deemed as one of the toughest exams according to many people. It’s not that easy to crack as it demands years of preparation. But Sanjeev Bikhchandani broke all stereotypes and cracked the exam. Interestingly, he did not prefer to join IIT because he had other ideas.
He was raised in a regular middle-class family. His father was a doctor at a government hospital with minimum income and his mother was a housewife. After finishing his Bachelors of Arts with specialization in Economics, he joined Lintas as an Accounts Executive in 1984.
He worked there for 3 years, following which he moved to Ahmedabad to pursue his PGDM from Indian Institute of Management in 1987. Later, he was recruited by Hindustan MilkFood Manufacturers (HMM)- GlaxoSmithKline (at present) as their Product Executive in 1989. He was posted there to manage the marketing of Horlicks.
Even as he had a secure and well-paying job, this did not really satisfy him much. So, he wanted to do business.
“In the year 1997, he left his MNC job that paid him Rs 80,000 annually. I struggled for 10. . . no, 13 years. I had moved out of the MNC job rather early. My salary was Rs 80,000 per annum. This was decent in 1990 but I was not giving up a Rs 20 lakh (Rs 2 million) job to come to a zero rupee salary,” he was quoted as saying by Rediff.
He always wanted to stand on his own legs as he set up Naukri.com, jobs portal on a server in the United States.
After working for a year, he quit and in 1990 started 2 companies- Indmark and Info Edge (India).
Digging a bit deep, Indmark was more about a database of trademarks on which they did searches and Info Edge was about salary surveys.
Info Edge also owns some of the popular websites like Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, Brijj.com, Naukrigulf.com, Shiksha.com, Quadrangle and Firstnaukri.com as well.
In 1997, he launched Naukri.com with 1,000 ads which were picked from various magazines. In fact, it was a database of resume, jobs and recruitment consultants. It was intended to be the right platform where job seekers and hiring managers searched met.
In the initial year, Naukri earned Rs.2.35 lakhs of business (even when 80% of the jobs were free). In the following year, it jumped straight to Rs.18 lakhs.
In 2004, the company started to increase to a sensational lift as it earned Rs.45 crores from fresh ads and booked profits worth Rs. 8.4 crores. In 2005, he was nominated as a finalist for “Ernst and Young – Entrepreneur of the Year” award. The company became India’s first Dotcom Company to get marked on the Bombay & National Stock Exchanges in 2006.
In 2012, Naukri stole the spotlight as it entered the Mobile world and launched their first Mobile App for Smartphone users- Blackberry, Android and iPhone devices. Due to this change, more than half of traffic inflow now happened through Apps and Mobile websites.
And today, Naukri.com with a massive database of about 37 Million+ registered job seekers, controls almost 70% of the online job market traffic share.
With a net worth of Rs 4,285 crore, today, he is one of India’s richest 100.