Why iimjobs.com has gone the “Freemium” Route?

Last week, we introduced a paid membership plan for candidates with additional features and benefits that are now not available to free members. This included new offerings such as:

 

• the recently launched “Insights” feature (which helps you compare your application against all other applications received for a particular job)

• a unique ad free job search experience (devoid of all advertisements on the site)

• a star icon against your application (to improve visibility) and,

• the ability to follow-up against positions where you were a good fit but did not hear back from the recruiter.

The paid membership plan also gives you access to an additional, existing feature that was earlier free for all users

• The ability to view your status against already applied jobs.

This basically meant that whenever a recruiter performed an action on any candidate’s application (such as Viewed, Downloaded, Shortlisted and Not Suitable), two things would happen:

1. The updated status would show up under the candidates “Applied Jobs” section.
2. The candidate would receive a mail mentioning the current status.

As of now, a candidate needs to pay a nominal amount of money to access the above 5 features.

Over the past few days, we’ve received a few mails from candidates asking us “Why we’re charging for these services?” Some were outright in their opinion that a jobseeker should not have to pay for anything. Ever!

Others were a little less expressive but the gist of their message did convey their displeasure.

So then, the question remains; why did we opt to go in for a Freemium model?  Before that we want to be very clear that paying is still optional for candidates. We’ve still kept the basic and most important functionality FREE for ALL users and that is the ability to apply to jobs. Recruiters still have access to ALL applications made against any posting. We’re only charging a small amount for additional features that will enhance your job search and we’ve purposefully kept it at an extremely low amount so that it doesn’t pinch anyone.

To understand the context better, you’ll need to know a little bit about our history and how iimjobs.com was founded. Tarun started this early in 2008 as a side project and till late 2010, it was him managing this all alone. Then, we raised a little money, hired a few good people, invested in technology and began to build better tools to help jobseekers.

All this while, we’ve brought you amazing, premium jobs that no other job site/portal can match! We’ve been doing this consistently for over 5 years now and will continue to bring you even more awesome jobs.  We’ve innovated and delivered useful products such as allowing users to “follow tags” and build their jobfeed and trying to close the “feedback loop” through status change notifications.

Everything has been free all along but unfortunately, it costs us a lot of money just to keep these services running on a daily basis. We need to invest in technology, hire engineers, and build better and more useful tools for recruiters and candidates alike to make the service better for everyone. All of which costs money!

2000 bucks for 6 months is an extremely small amount (roughly 333 rupees a month). How much money do we spend on a single visit to CCD or Barista? Or perhaps on a movie ticket?

Do you still feel this is unjustified on our behalf to charge jobseekers such a low amount (and it’s not mandatory to pay)? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the same.

We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services – Mark Zuckerberg