Yellojobs: Emails asking for payment ignored
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.

On Jan 20, 2010, Techgoss had exclusively reported on the rise, stumble and fall of Yellojobs in India.  Unfortunately, many of the Yellojobs ex-employees were not paid their dues as the company struggled to find its feet in the competitive Indian job portal market.

Since the Techgoss report, we has been handed copies of emails sent to Yellojobs management requesting payment.  These mails were just ignored. (Note: Techgoss has not edited the letters in any shape or form. But we have suppressed the names of employees for obvious reasons)

(Brief background to these emails: Mr. Andreas Koestler was the CEO of the company but had to vacate the position in the last few months to Mr. Wolfgang Viragh (until then the CFO). The 'TO' names all the directors. In the 'CC' were all the employees)

“

Subject: Urgent: To The Directors and The Investors of Yellojobs.com India
To: "Dr. Andreas Koestler" <kofty@koestler.com >, grant.w@dmsasialimited.com , david.audy@mncgroup.com , daryng@ycsindia.com , mm@gruenwaldequity.de , paul.s@dmsasialimited.com , mltan@cnplaw.com , piers.b@dmsasialimited.com , ssoh@cnplaw.com , Nor.Hafiza.Alwi@sg.tricorglobal.com , nina@rectrain.com , wolfgang.viragh@yellomedia.com
Cc:

Hi Andreas Sir,

We do understand that you are not in a position to answer our queries but as a responsible member of Yellojobs.com you can at least help us and take follow up action with Mr. Wolfgang as we cannot see that he is really very much concerned about his own employees by not giving any conclusive reply to so many mails that we sent in past few days.

This is really very sad to see that our seniors, who in bad days of Yellojobs expected us to be with them and work at our best, and now when we are passing through such bad phase because of not being paid for the work provided, the responsible people of Yello Board are just trying to escape and abscond by not answering our queries and telling us that they have either resigned or not in a position to answer. Is this professionalism??

I am sure everyone is aware that Mr. Wolfgang visited India in past week but, instead of solving our queries and concluding things he was busy in touring India with his family and that too not even bothered to visit Yellojobs- Noida office. May be he was scared... And then he called me, Ravi and Ankit to meet at Hotel Lobby and asked us to work on a new Business Plan, I want to ask him was he just trying to check our patience or something else??

We learn from our seniors and believe me you people are really teaching us very good lessons for our future and trying to make us aware that we should never ever be doing any sort of business with you people. If you guys did not had the money to run this company you should have told us three months earlier, may be in Sep'08 at least that would have not spoiled the two year old relationship.

We purely believe that The Directors & Investors of Yello Pte. are completely responsible for the failure of Yellojobs- India; inspite of giving several indications and business plans by Mr. Vikramjeet Singh in past days, you people always delayed in implementing which has brought us in this situation. None of you is even bothered to come ahead and take the responsibilty; we are really ashamed of this behaviour of management and feel so dishonest to tell our family and friends that we were working with such irresponsible peoples who have left us with no good example(s) to share.

Mr. Wolfgang, further to our previous discussions I would like to bring to your kind notice that none of us is now interested to work any further in the new business plan proposed to you.  We all (Yello India Team) now request you to clear off our dues along with our Form 16 and Relieving / Experience Letters on an urgent basis. Also, we won’t mind if you pay for our Notice Period as well.

I am forwarding the pending salaries detail sheet, please find enclosed the same.

We hope that you will surely reply to this mail without delaying any further.

Best Regards
Team - Yello India

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On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Dr. Andreas Koestler < kofty@koestler.com> wrote:

Dear XXXXXX and all,

As much as I would like to answer your pleas, I am not in a position to do this any more. The CEO is the person you should address.

Thanks for your understanding and best regards

Andreas

---

On 3/24/09, XXXXX wrote

Hello Sir,
 
              I am one of the team members of yello india, from the last few days, things have got worst in my life. As we all know that we didn’t get our salaries from January. I have tremendous pressure. The market conditions are still very bad I am not able to find single job from last 1 month. I have loads of dues to pay. I am into dilemma that whether I’ll go for suicide or wait for your kind support. So please help us by giving our salaries at least.
 
XXXXX

“
 

(Techgoss had published the following article on Jan 20, 2010)

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.