How Does a ‘Stay-at-home Mom’ Manage a Specialized CA/MBA Jobs Web Portal?

Chartered Accountants and MBA graduates have specialist skills that often fail to get properly highlighted by run-of-the-mill recruiting agencies whose expertise do not go beyond listing salary expectations and perks. It was to fill this gap Chartered Accountant couple Sonia and Anurag Singal came up with cajobportal.com.

Launched in August 2013 as a blog, it is now a full- fledged recruitment portal that has CA professionals to help recruiters find the right kind of person to fill a particular post. Sonia, in a wide-ranging interview with OneYearmba.co.in, talks about the challenges they faced, the help they received while Anurag was doing his PGPX at IIM Ahmedabad and future plans and prospects for the bootstrapped venture.

Asked how it all began, Sonia says Anurag had discovered the gap between candidates and finance job vacancies while teaching CA students for ICAI at GMCS (General Management and Communication Skills course) classes. On an average, ~6000 candidates had registered in each of the last 15 terms; and ~ 1130 jobs have been offered each term. Thus, only around 18.64% managed to secure jobs through ICAI Campus Placement

“While some lacked communication skills, for others, it took multiple attempts to crack the ICAI’s placement test. There were yet others who depended on the age-old method of relying on friends and relatives to channelize resumes. All this inspired me to start the cajobportal.com, in August 2013, as India’s first job site exclusively for Chartered Accountants, Cost Accountants, Company Secretary and MBA (Finance),” she adds.

However, it was Anurag’s decision to go in for a one-year Post-Graduate Programme in Management for Executives (PGPX) at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) that took the blog to the next level, a full- fledged recruitment portal that was also commercially viable.

“In the last 18 months, we have clocked aggregate Billable CTC of INR 10 crores+ across clients (average CTC ranging from Rs 5 lakh p.a. to Rs 40 lakh p.a.),” says Sonia. “For CY 2016, we clocked a website traffic of 100,000+ Users generating 1 mn+ page views (Source- Google Analytics),” she adds.

“Price, as well as domain expertise, is a key concern as corporates seek value addition from recruitment agencies

Asked what made Anurag choose the 1-year PGPX rather than the 2-year Post Graduate Program (PGP), she says for several reasons, he was unable to prepare for CAT and pursue a 2-year MBA program after graduation. He then decided to focus on the CA course and cleared the Finals in November 2007 with All India Rank 22. Subsequently, he worked across companies including ITC and Tata Steel.

“I am 2 years junior to Anurag and also completed CA in subsequent years. We got married in 2012. As things eventually stabilised on the economic front, in the year 2014, we had to choose between a new residential apartment and an MBA.

“Our daughter was just 10 months old and Anurag was the only earning member in the family. There was a huge embedded financial risk of paying the Rs 21.50 lakh course fee and take a sabbatical from work for one year, especially when he was doing reasonably well in his current job and would be promoted if he stayed on. Yet, he chose MBA. It was now or never for us. I accompanied him to the campus,” Sonia says.

“Among options available in India, we chose IIM Ahmedabad because of the brand, the FT rankings and special emphasis this institute places on case study methodology. Also, Chartered Accountancy is a distance learning course and thus we always missed the classroom experience. Needless to say, staying on the beautiful 100-acre campus made it a very special experience for us, as a family,” she adds.

How did the time spent in IIMA help in developing Cajobportal.com? Sonia says interactions with the faculty and program participants made them realise that the CSR model they were following was not sustainable. “Our model was replicable and could get lost in the overcrowded recruitment space. There were no entry barriers and users perceived little differentiation among the various portals.

“We were encouraged by the IIM faculty and senior CA professionals to convert our blog into a full- fledged recruitment portal. Hence, we decided to go commercial. Senior Chartered Accountants and IIMA alums including the co-founder and former COO of naukri.com, agreed to join our Advisory Board,” she adds.

The Advisory Board comprises Hari Mundra, former Group CFO-RPG; V N Saroja, Co-founder and former COO- naukri.com; Arvind Sahay, Professor and Head-India Gold Policy Center@IIMA; Dilip Apte, ex-HDFC GM Corporate Relations and Prof Biju Varkkey, Professor at IIM-A.

“We approached corporates for B2B tie-ups, bundling the value proposition of an online platform and offline search consultant, hitherto regarded as just a postman of Cvs,” she says.

What surprises many is on learning that the company, with a revenue of Rs. 3 million employs just 5 female members who all operate under’ Work from Home’ arrangement. “Quitting or taking a break from a corporate career does not come easy for women. Because success for her does not just mean career success, she often opts to “Lean In” at some point, which was once described as the “Opt-Out” revolution in the US. Raising happy productive children, contributing to the world around her and yet pursuing work that is meaningful is their desire,” Sonia points out.

“Today, a qualified woman professional need not sacrifice her hard earned skillsets in order to find better work-life balance,” she says.

“I work from home. I have an entire team which works from their homes and I haven’t even met most of them.

The team works balancing both scales of their lives. There is a girl whose father is suffering from cancer. Another one is stuck in a remote location in Kerala tending to her family. There is also an expecting mother and a girl studying for her CA Finals, Sonia adds.

“All of them log into their systems together at 9.30 AM and work until 6.30 PM. Aided by software utilities such as Basecamp for project management, Hub Staff for employee time tracking, we have zero comprise on efficiency,” she says.

“Sometimes when I am on a call with my clients and my daughter calls out for me, they hear her voice and ask me, ‘Are you working from home or have you brought your daughter to work?’ It leaves them wondering because they never realised a stay-at-home-mom was running the organisation,” she adds.

About Cajobs portal, she says, “Our verticals range from CA Industrial Trainee to CA CFO, thus capturing the entire life cycle of a finance professional. With our focus on earning money through Featured Jobs as well as disseminating free information about government jobs in finance, internships etc; we have seen increasing popularity among users. They get a daily update on jobs across the spectrum

The portal has various sections like Featured Jobs that work on finance positions on a percentage of CTC based ‘success fee’ model. Career Site and PSU Jobs sections have information on jobs where candidates can apply themselves. There is a Third Party Listing where the employer can post jobs.

“Price, as well as domain expertise, is a key concern as corporates seek value addition from recruitment agencies

What we offer is a differentiation strategy that centres around specialists handling the recruitment cycle. They would engage with prospects around technical terms like IFRS, GST and Derivatives, instead of just the clichéd CTC, location and notice period,” says Sonia.

“The ability to leverage our internal database as well as the daily traffic on cajobportal.com to target active job-seekers for client’s open positions and thus deliver quick turnaround times is another advantage,” she adds.

Sonia claims that the cost is also lower than the industry benchmark. “Today, we are trusted by 100+ marquee brands spanning India, Singapore, Middle East and Africa. These include the top 50% of BSE-30 companies including HUL, P&G, Asian Paints, Pepsi, Cipla, Roche, Wipro, HDFC, GS, Suhain Bhawan and Indorama.

Her future plans include securing 5X growth in the size of the database through advertisement and ‘word of mouth’ as the uniqueness of profiles is a key source of competitive advantage, increasing domestic client base by 2X, client acquisition and local liaising abroad through Affiliate Relationships.

It also includes leapfrogging into the CFO mandates – Higher Ticket Size and often exclusive/limited mandates;

Exploring avenues of an Elance-like online marketplace for short-term assignments for finance professionals and practising CA firms. Technical features like Video Profiling, Machine Learning Algorithms, etc. to add value in online posting.

Sonia Singal is a Commerce graduate from Shri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata. She is a Chartered Accountant and also a CFA and MS (Finance). She has worked for 2+ years at Deloitte, Hyderabad before taking over as Head-Operations of cajobportal.com. (Image source:pexels.com)