Hotlrs.com, a marriage between Linkedin and Job Board

The job portal space is extremely saturated with websites such as Babajobs, Monster, Naukri, Shine – one might almost think there could be no room for yet another recruitment website. However, hotlrs.com has managed to distinguish itself from the pack by targeting a niche sector, providing low cost solutions for interactions between the employer and the potential employee and recruiting services.

Inception

The founders Ashish Sharma and Aashish Das worked at an RPO unit (recruitment process outsourcing) before they left to start their own venture in March 2014. They felt that there was a greater need to facilitate direct contact between the two stakeholders in the process of recruitment – the employer and the employee. Features such as InMail by Linkedin are only accessible after a sizeable subscription fee. The hotlrs team hopes to catalyse instant job matching by providing email details through their resume service and connecting the job seeker directly to recruitment agencies and hiring managers. Ashish calls the venture a marriage between Linkedin and Job Board.

The founders’ decision to target the hospitality sector was purely due to their prior experience. The duo had amassed sufficient expertise vetting candidates in the hospitality sector in their RPO days.

Development

Ashish and Aashish invested their time into developing their company profile, getting a high-quality web-portal up and running and working out the legalities associated with setting up a company. Nine months later, hotlrs.com went live on January 24, 2015. The team consisting of two founders, a recruitment head, and three recruiters, is based out of Mumbai. Vikas Sharma, the recruitment head was a key player in conceptualising some of the distinguishing features of the platform. The founders are yet to reach out to their five lakh- strong hospitality industry network that they built from their RPO experience.

Hotlrs.com even offers a ‘Virtual Recruiter’ feature that allows the employer to outsource the process of finding the right candidate to hotlrs.com. To generate demand for the feature, the team has decided to provide the service for free. Once it gains enough traction, they aim to leverage their own experience and Hotlrs’ database of employer-employee profiles to provide suitable matches to both its clients – employers and job-seekers.

Way ahead

The hotlrs.com team is looking to add close to 10,000 members in the next three months and two lakh users by December 2016. They’re also looking to expand to other sectors they are familiar with like IT, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, transportation and life sciences.