Sanjeev Bhikchandani

Sanjeev Bhikchandani is the CEO of Info Edge , the company behind India's largest job portal naukri.com. Sanjeev holds a bachelors in Economics from St. Stephen's, Delhi and an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad and today, sits over a business worth Rs 45 crore (Rs 450 million) with 600 employees and 35 offices all over the country, which includes jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, asknaukri.com, allcheckdeals.com, naukrigulf.com and brijj.com apart from the flagship website naukri.com.
Sanjeev comes from a middle-class family based in Delhi. His father was a doctor with the Government and mother a housewife. His entrepreneural journey is a great example of determination and patience.
Sanjeev quit his job at Glaxosmithkline (then HMM) to start Info Edge. He says it was during his stint with HMM that he realised that employees love talking about jobs and career movement and realised jobs are an extremely high interest information category for almost all people and headhunting had tremendous potential.
His first office was in the servant's quarter above the garage in his father's house, paying his father a rent of Rs 800. Though the company was kept afloat, he was unable to draw a salary and ran the house on his wife's salary (Sanjeev's wife Surabhi was his batchmate at IIM-A and worked for Nestle till she too joined Sanjeev at Info Edge). To meet his personal expenses, he would also teach at business schools as visiting faculty on weekends.
The turning point came when he visited IT Asia in 1996 that he came to know of the World Wide Web for the first time! To register the website and get a domain name, he had to take help from his brother, who lived in the US (as all the servers were only in USA at that time). The naukri.com site was set up in March 1997 as a division of InfoEdge. At that time the number of internet users in India was merely 14000.
What is interesting is that he could not get any domain name he wanted (all such names which had the word job were already registered) and had to settle for the Hindi term "naukri" (which literally means job), which actually makes it different from other jobsites even today. At this point he was joined by another IIM-A graduate, V N Saroja.
With the recession, he had to take up a part-time job at The Pioneer, an English daily. In the morning, he used to work for naukri.com, go to The Pioneer during the day and then get back to naukri.com in the evening.
During the dot-com boom in India he got funded by ICICI ventures. In 2006, Info Edge became the first pure Indian dot-com company to conduct a successful IPO. Today, naukri.com gets over 100 million page views a month and has over 3.5 million registered users. It is estimated that over 700,000 people have found jobs through naukri.com. Over 15,000 organisations have used the site for recruitment.
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