techTribe, a career networking portal for India that also acts as a platform for online recruitment, is up for sale, according to ContentSutra.
In an interview to VCCircle, techTribe CEO and Founder Rohit Agarwal said that their business model for online recruitment was failing.
The New Delhi and San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2006, hoped to make money by becoming a referral job portal. It had received an undisclosed amount of funding from Canaan Partners, US-based Miven Venture Partners and The Entrepreneur Funds in 2007.
Agarwal initially denied recent reports that the company was struggling, only to later admit that a strategic development was in progress.
According to ContentSutra, techTribe has about half a million users. Its revenues come from companies posting their jobs which subsequently get referred by members on its network. Another revenue stream is from sponsorships of various ‘tribes.’
Agarwal said that techTribe has 30-odd major communities, and hundreds of user generated ones. It’s not known how much revenues the company clocks currently.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 11:05 am
Have any of these referral sites (Zubka, Yellojobs, JobTonic, H3, etc. been successful? Even though the concept of a referral site is simple enough and at a high level, appears like it would be a good business, the volume of referrals that people make has yet to hit critical mass on any of these sites.
Why hasn’t the public embraced the opportunity to help a friend find a new job and get paid while doing it? Do people have a fear of how the person they’re referring for a job will react to being referred? I’d love to hear thoughts as to what people think is fundamentally wrong with this business idea and why no organization has really gained any traction.