2.5 million job seekers created profiles with us in the past 12 months

Where did the idea for Rozee.pk come from? In 2003, I moved back to Pakistan with a small amount of angel investment, the first form of investment that start-ups get from friends. Among the angel investors was Reid Hoffman, who was the founder of PayPal and LinkedIn and Mark Pincus who started Zynga. I started a Muslim social networking site in the early days, for people to meet and interact. It was called naseeb.com. It's a very well-known site in the US, more than it is here. It was free of charge, and six months later we started charging and added features through which people could pay. It grew very rapidly.
Then we needed to hire more people for this website. At that time, a newspaper advertisement averaged Rs800,000 and newspaper ads were the main source for recruiting people. For a company that spent about $45000 to launch, spending another $12,000 on a one-day ad was ridiculous. I had done a lot of hiring through the internet in the US. Therefore, we launched Rozee as a way to hire ourselves. We launched it in two weeks, and soon, other IT firms also starting advertising jobs on it. So we practically paid nothing for hiring new employees. Over the next year or two, we realised that all the IT companies are hiring through us and we thought why are we restricted to IT only? There was no other real dominant job site, even though there were 30 other job sites in Pakistan when we launched, which were small sites, such as mustakbil.com, bayrozgar.com, brightfire.com, run by people graduated in IT backgrounds, who did not focus on the business aspect of it.
How do you publicise and advertise Rozee.pk?
We don't pay for advertising but we like to barter to have a win-win situation for both parties. For example, in exchange for rozee.pk ads on trolleys in airports, we created a system for them to geo-code their inventory. Then we have a campaign site called findbasanti.com to promote our rickshaw advertising. This is a competition site whereby people have to take photographs of rickshaws branded with our logos, and put that on the site, and the winner will be selected via a draw. The rickshaw owner and the winner of the picture contest get Rs2500 each every week. It was a very successful advertising since we got a lot of publicity by word-of-mouth.
Then we had job fairs on the ground. These job fairs were a way of convincing people in the early days about the credibility of the business. Many HR managers were skeptical of putting up ads on the internet because they were worried it would affect their brand's image. We had to prove that the CVs they were getting on the virtual portal were actually people. We'd get media sponsors, who'd give us advertising in print and TV which we didn't pay for. Job fairs started off small, but they've gradually grown. 135,000 people attended the last job fair across three cities. We made a lot of money on those events because we had sponsors who paid for sponsorships and who paid for booths. Therefore, it was great because we got tremendous PR and advertising, while making money at the same time.
How did you grow Rozee.pk to where it is today?
We were very aggressive with our accounts. When we were operating in Pakistan, there was a large international player, bayt.com operating here as well. They were operating in Pakistan three years before we came to Pakistan. We got many of their accounts because we were under-pricing. In 2007, they concluded that Pakistan was a market not worth pursuing and closed offices at the end of 2007, declaring that it is a dangerous market, and its economy is going down, etc. After that, they had two down years and one flat year while we grew over 6000 percent in 2007! So, it was definitely a market worth pursuing. We also got into educational institutions, and 88 of them have rozee.pk powered placement portals, including the IBA.
We were very aggressive to have an edge. At the end of 2007, we were approached by some investors, a NY-based hedge fund, and a Dubai-based investment fund. We were not really exploring investment, but then we thought why not. But the deal with these investors did not turn out positively. We looked at other investors, but the difficult part in convincing them was to invest in Pakistan, which became my major selling pitch - selling Pakistan. Out of 12 investors I approached, only three were willing to invest with us. I chose two out of these, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson investment fund, which was the same investor fund that funded Hotmail, and ePlanet ventures, which had funded Skype. Despite much ado and things going bad in the country, they did end up investing with us and we've seen fantastic growth after that.
We were featured in Haravrd All World Study, an organisation that evaluates the fastest growing private companies in the emerging part of the world. Rozee.pk was ranked number 9 out of 100 recently. We're about to close another investment now, and we're expanding into the Middle East. So this is a year of globalizing for us. How does the website actually work? Employers have the option of sifting through CVs randomly or they can post a job and evaluate applicants. We have a database of 2.5 million unique CVs. We don't auto-apply anybody, applicants have to do that themselves. We dont have any features that pair applicants with particular jobs, you can apply to any job that you wish to. Employers can sift through CVs according to particular criteria using their Rozee.pk accounts. Because of this, many CVs may not be viewed because your views can be easily narrowed down to your criteria, for example, as per city, age bracket, gender, work experience, skill set etc. So it's very, very efficient in searching; No human being can do this.
How does Rozee.pk earn revenues?
We charge employers. Employers pay us to post a job, to search through CVs. We also offer our hiring site services, for example, Engro, Mobilink, etc, have career pages linked to our site. Next, we actually conduct searches for them, assisting hiring. Then we have social integration, so we connect links with your corporate Facebook page, etc so we are like a social hiring site.
How many users does Rozee.pk get in a day, on average?
6.8 million unique people visited rozee.pk in the last 12 months of which 2.5 million created profiles and uploaded their CVs. We have an amazing amount of data on people. There's no site in Pakistan with such a huge registered user database.
Have you been able to utilise the data for other purposes as well?
HEC asked us to get data on employability from various schools. We ran a report on various educational institutions registered with the HEC and how many people had been employed from those institutions. They used this data for ranking educational institutions. Our work with the HEC was also featured in a local newspaper in October. But we provide data as needed without compromising privacy because that is a big issue for us.
What about people applying to job postings abroad?
Rozee has been a Pakistani site, so I focus on Pakistan. People abroad who want to work in Pakistan, people in Pakistan who want to work abroad in companies that are hiring from Pakistan. We have a lot of international companies that hire through us, but the focus always has a Pakistan angle.
And how do you track the success of Rozee.pk?
I track how of the jobs posted result in a hire. Our success rate is 64 percent right now, ie 64 percent of all jobs posted on Rozee results in a hire.
Have you noticed any difference female versus male employees?
Females actually get higher salaries by about Rs12,000 a month. Firstly, there is a supply side problem. The number of females in the job market is far fewer than needed. There are many jobs in which people prefer females, for eg call centres. Then there're diversity issues as well. In Pakistan, specifically, when you go to a meeting