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Online jobs portal and talent platform Monster.com recently raised about Rs 137.5 crore in a funding round led by Akash Bhansali of Volrado Venture Partners and Mohandas Pai. Existing investor Quess Corp also participated in the round.

Talking about the fundraise, Sekhar Garisa, CEO, Monster.com shares that the fundraise is a good first milestone for the company in its journey towards transformation. For the past couple of years, the team has been rebuilding their product and getting to the point where they can call it a talent platform and not just a job portal. “Very relieved and happy and very excited about the journey ahead,” he says.

While speaking about focus areas, he mentions that Monster.com works as a job board, whose primary function is to connect recruiters with job seekers. He adds that post-pandemic, there is a noticeable change when it comes to hiring processes and the expectations of the candidates and as well as companies. There is a lack of full-stack experience for either candidates or recruiters in terms of the job boards business, he adds. “What we’re pioneering now is a talent platform concept,” says Sekhar.

Monster.com has been working on fundamentally changing the candidate profiles with not just the information that they provide but also with information from the web and insights gained in the last couple of quarters. “We are banking on the fact that at Monster.com, we would have more information per candidate than any of the peer platforms,” says Sekhar.

Apart from that, the platform is working on enabling candidates to have access to upskilling opportunities, specific interview preparation, and mentorship from peer groups. For Monster.com, Sekhar says that aggregation and automation are going to be the two focus pillars around which their entire product is going to be built.

Commenting on hiring trends, he adds that the demand in the market is exceeding supply at present and there is a fundamental shift in the way employers and employees are engaging with each other. This year, there was a significant increase in demand noticed across almost all the sectors. “We’re ending the year with about 13-14 percent growth over the year before,” he says.

He adds that “tech” will continue to lead the hiring boom and there would be certain segments under tech which would be greater in demand than the others. Apart from that, there will be other emerging trends such as customer success stories, hybrid model of working, etc.

“I just don’t see the demand for jobs going down anytime soon,” says Sekhar.

In terms of metrics, Sekhar says that they have noticed a significant improvement in metrics with regards to revenue and from a qualitative perspective in the past year. He believes that in their line of business, retention of customers has to be a key focus area. “We have almost doubled our retention rates in the last six quarters,” he says.

Another important metric that the company tracks religiously is their ability to attract new customers to their platform, and for the last three quarters, they claim to be signing up 2,000 new customers contracts every single quarter, he shares. Customer satisfaction is another important metric for Monster.com and that went up by 60 percent in the past year.

Lastly, in terms of the number of candidates and jobs on the platform, Sekhar says that in the last six months, the number of people who actively engaged on the platform has grown by 3x and there are about half a million jobs on the platform.