Rozee.pk recently raised over $6.5 million in Series C venture funding from Vostok Nafta and Piton Capital Lead Investment to drive its growth. Considering Pakistan is world’s sixth-most populous country and has a growing middle-class, you will be see a massive surge in the number of job applications in the next few years which only signals huge profitability for Rozee.pk and its investors.
But it has got tough competition from LinkedIn, one of the fastest growing business networks in Pakistan and abroad. Many firms already use LinkedIn as their top go-to source when recruiting new candidates. But it’s interesting that LinkedIn didn’t see Rozee.pk as its competition a few years ago when the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman invested $25,000 in it. Surely, Hoffman would reconsider his decision now.
And it is my belief that today you get a better chance of being hired by a top firm if you pay more attention to your LinkedIn profile than wasting time in sending your CV for every possible vacancy that pops up on Rozee.pk. So the quality of the candidate database that you’ll be getting on Rozee.pk will make your HR regret their work. Of course, one advantage that Rozee.pk does have over LinkedIn in Pakistan is that it’s much cheaper to post a job on Rozee.pk than to advertise it on LinkedIn.
Monis Rehman, the CEO of Rozee.pk, believes that there will be 60 million Internet users in Pakistan by 2019 and so the size of the applicant pool will increase substantially. When Monis moved back to Pakistan from the Silicon Valley, he initially started a matchmaking website, but later decided to open up a job portal too to earn more revenue. Now that job portal has become the no.1 website for job-seekers and job-givers in Pakistan.
The site is used by over 10,000 companies and 5 million job-seekers today and processes over 1.5 million applications every month. It is expected that the latest funding would allow for more spending on marketing resulting in an increase in sales for Rozee.pk. More jobs posted would mean more candidates would apply, and thus less people will be unemployed. This would be true if we were leaving in an idealistic world, but the fact is that yes there are many jobs in markets that many people have not heard about. If Rozee.pk is able to capture those markets, then we may see a boom in the Pakistani economy.
