Info Edge India (the Naukri Group) has launched a website for career guidance - asknaukri.com - in collaboration with career guidance company Workeasy. This seems to mark the beginning of a horizontal expansion for the company - from job listings to other aspects related to jobs. AskNaukri focuses on aspects of career guidance like career transitions, resumes and office advice. Answers to questions sent by users are are published within 48 hours.

Apoorva Kumar- VP & National Head- Mobility, Ad Sales & Investments told me that they’ve launched it as a separate site (unlike recruiter blogs which was hosted on Naukri.com itself) because they don’t want to treat it as just “another feature” - Naukri wants to create a separate ecosystem around it. Also, they’ve gone ahead with professional counselors at their own expense instead of going down the user generated “Answers” route to avoid frivolous answers to serious questions; they’d done a pilot with user generated answers as well. Why have they only tied up with one recruitment firm, and not allowed many to answer? A commercial relationship makes whoever is answering the questions accountable. On why they haven’t gone with individual domain experts instead, Kumar says that around 70-80 percent of career guidance questions are similar, which Workeasy handles regularly; career guidance is not as fragmented as, say, medicine. Workeasy does have tie-ups in place for specific guidance as well, and Naukri is willing to expand its panel if needed.

Naukri plans to add mobile functionality to the site and will also deploy asknaukri across operator WAP portals. Operators apparently are not going to charge for it either - they want to wait and watch before monetization. Later, Naukri intends to implement a dual trigger with responses on email and SMS. The company will also syndicate answers content, with alliances with media companies, saying that “there’s a paucity of real answers for real people”. Also a part of the plans are events and seminars for Asknaukri users within the next quarter.

On signing up, the site requires a phone number and email ID. Once it is integrated with Naukri.com, I think it will add additional context to to Naukri’s database of users.