Techgoss exclusive: The Yellojobs inside story
By Arvind Singh

Refer a job and earn money was a great business idea indeed. Thousands of rupees for just emailing a good job opportunity to a friend. But this idea didn’t come from any of the giants of Indian job portal market. Instead it was from a newbie called Yellojobs.com. This was Yellojobs first shot at fame, and also the last.

Yellojobs closed down its operations in India within two years – just like the many internet companies that die unnoticed. Here’s how a great business idea and the company were killed.

Yellojobs.com had a history before coming up with the “refer and earn” model. Yello Inc, which ran certain unsuccessful online classified portals in South East Asia, decided to set foot in India. For this it partnered with NDTV, the reputed news channel, which is also notorious for starting and swiftly ending several internet partnerships. It was named NDTVjobs.com after the news channel. Vikramjit Singh Sahaye, a manager in Timesjobs, was General Manager, India operations. Andreas Koestler was the CEO. 

NDTVjobs.com began as a traditional job portal – companies post their job ads and jobseekers reply to them. However, surviving in a market with biggies like Naukri.com and Monster.com was difficult. It took the management more than a year to realize this. The search for a niche segment brought them to the “refer and earn” model that was being successfully practiced in the west. 

However, what worked in the west, didn’t work for Yellojobs.com though.

There were many immediate reasons. When the new feature was launched for the public, the server crashed due to increased traffic. Then there were problems with the site because of which people were not able to register or search jobs. For even a single change in the website, permission had to be taken from Thailand headquarters, which took several weeks. But the first nail in the coffin was when Yellojobs.com decided to part ways with NDTV.

At the end of first year, the management of Yellojobs.com decided to end partnership with NDTV. If they had thought that bringing along the news channel would give them free advertising, it was not so. There were no free lunches for Yellojobs – only an inconspicuous button on their website that directed to the job portal – all of this for a fee running in lakhs.

But the presence of NDTV was also a promise of a potential. The internet world has several garage stories, but if you don’t have a promising product, deep pockets is the next best thing to survive. With that too gone, Yellojobs.com was yet another struggler in the internet industry.

However, it didn’t quit as easily. A large number of IT companies work on internal referral systems for recruitment. Yellojobs.com decided to introduce them to a much bigger talent pool by making the referral system universal. A few companies agreed to use the services – but this was often at their own terms – which meant Yellojobs.com kept very little margin for itself and did this as a relationship building exercise. Similarly there were other processes added to please employers but none of them worked.

By the end of the year 2008, Yellojobs.com was destined to close. Recession was at its peak and Yello Inc had recently tested another failure – it had set up Yellojobs.com operations in the USA. However, within months of setting up business, all three of the top management people in the US had quit.

By then Yellojobs.com had emptied its coffers – some of the investors too had ditched complaining about recession. It had dues for office rent and not even money enough to pay its employees. The employees were not paid their salaries for the three months of 2009 leaving them to fend for themselves at a time when job market was at an all time low. Vikramjit Singh Sahaye, GM, resigned as soon as he got a better opportunity. A few investors were ready to invest but when they heard of his resignation, they backed again – who bets on a company that has no management.

Wolfgang Viragh, who had only recently become the CEO of the organization, didn’t come to meet and console the employees when he visited India – he feared they would become violent. When the employees demanded their salaries, he said if they can submit a business proposal to the investors, he will make sure all salaries are paid. How can backend employees prepare a proposal for investors?

Finally one day in March, 2009, the landlord decided to get back his dues by confiscating the assets of the company – all he got were some desktops. The employees came on road. They decided to take the legal route but since they were just over two dozen employees there were no concessions made for them as in the case of Jet Airways employees.

Thus, Yellojob.com died an unnoticed death. The website is still live – the management made some profit of selling the website to a lesser known company. NDTV tried to revive NDTVjobs.com with a partnership with Careerbuilder.com but that too failed.