Meet Naukri.com’s Vibhore Sharma, whose resume does not mention even a college degree Lets meet him here:-

Vibhore Sharma’s story is a testimony to how passion trumps everything. He lost his father while he was still in school and couldn’t go to college. He had to start working early to support his family, but he didn’t let it come in his way. Our Techie Tuesdays of the week, Vibhore is the CTO of Naukri.com, the company he joined almost 16 years ago.

To know Vibhore Sharma is to know Naukri.com, the company he has been associated with for the past 16 years. This is quite an achievement for someone who was questioned everyday by his mother if he still held a job.

The superman childhood

Vibhore was born and brought up in Delhi in a middle-class family. His father was a mechanical engineer and Vibhore grew up looking at blueprints of machines and sketches of compressors.

He recollects being an extremely mischievous kid. In fact, his mother once tied his legs to make sure that he remained in her line of sight while she continued doing household chores.

Though he loved comic books, his family couldn’t afford buying them.So he rented them. Such was his love for superheroes, that he and his friend once fashioned capes out of towels and jumped off the first floor! Thankfully, the friend just had a broken bone, while Vibhore escaped with a few scratches.

In school, Vibhore spent a lot of time playing football. He loved organic chemistry. and opted for the Maths-Biology stream in Class XI.

Flipping the switch

I replay the time I heard the news in my head many times, but I still don’t know what was the first thought in my head; was it – ‘Oh! I lost my dad!’ or ‘Who’s going to earn the daily bread now?’

That was the moment when he flipped a switch. He had two choices after school – either join the forces or pursue literature in college. Since his mother didn’t let him go to the army, Vibhore was considering applying for admission to one of the DU colleges. He says, “While filling the form, a thought occurred to me: my mother has never worked at a job all her life but was now working. So I asked myself how I could go to college and have a blast while she was slogging.”

Vibhore’s father had had no savings. He says, “We were rebuilding the house, for which he had taken a loan from his friend. We didn’t have any money then. There was no way I could be without helping my mother.”

Job #1 – selling compressors

It wasn’t easy for Vibhore as, at 17, he didn’t have a clear sense of what was expected of him. Moreover, he felt out of place, surrounded by mechanical engineers and other qualified people. He says, “But you gotta do what you gotta do!And survival teaches a lot of sense.”

Vibhore read up on the subject and spoke to people in order to better understand the products he was selling.  He had to go to remote locations in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh to sell these products. He says,

In order to come across as more experienced, Vibhore tried to look more mature and started hanging out with clients in the evenings to break the ice.

This was the foundation for me, which got me thinking that survival was fundamental and taught me that if you don’t know something, you can figure it out along the way.

Finally, after three years at it, Vibhore left the job. He says,

I had no idea that I could do this. But I went about doing it. It was tough in the beginning. There were many times when people asked me to leave and send someone senior instead.

Paving the path to Naukri.com

Later on, when Pioneer newspaper and ITIL partnered, MyUsha.com would be run by Pioneer. Vibhore decided to join Pioneer and help them with tech. It was then a 3-4 member team then. Given the bandwidth, the team even took on some software development projects. This was Vibhore’s first full-time job in tech.

Unfortunately, MyUsha discontinued soon, leaving Vibhore with two options: either to go to the US on a friend’s invitation to work with him, or join Sanjeev Bikhchandani (who was also earlier working with The Pioneer) at Naukri.com on a role that was not yet clear.

Vibhore decided to join Sanjeev. At that time, Naukri.com was operating out of Sanjeev’s home. The company had recently raised funding from ICICI Ventures and the new office was under construction. Vibhore started figuring out how could he make himself useful there. He spoke to Anil Lall, who had built the website, and started chipping in. He worked on building the first resume manager.

Naukri.com – early days

Initially, Naukri.com’s tech stack was pretty much on Linux and the tech team had written its own C++ libraries. They were running FoxPro database on Linux machine, which at times resulted in bugs and issues on the website. Vibhore took on the mandate to fix the bugs.

Naukri.com had static pages then. They used zip HTML pages, uploaded them, unzipped them and renamed the directory to make the site ready. Google came around the same time, and all of a sudden, search became something to look at. Naukri.com team built search using their own stack.

For the first few years the website didn’t even have the option for people to upload their CVs or create their profile. The team just digitised the jobs published on multiple newspapers and listed the phone numbers and email IDs of recruiters to whom people could apply.

Moving ahead

Naukri.com soon launched its first resume form. Though there were some errors at the beginning, the team kept fixing them by re-indexing the whole data. The team also decided to move to a simpler stack PHP, MySQL (from C++). Vibhore says,

The idea of building the resume form was to enable job seekers and recruiters to start searching. We faced the classic problem of not having a lot of search on structured data. So, we used full text search on the CV in MySQL.

The tech team was quickly iterating the product based on market feedback.

By now, recruiters started depending on Naukri.com and they were milking the database of the million-plus job seekers registered on the platform. There were situations where MySQL would stop responding completely. Vibhore says, “We had to restart the sever, reboot it and restart MySQL, split the data, kill queries and whatever required to get the system up and running.”

Key challenges at Naukri.com

Over the years, while scaling the performance of the system, Naukri.com has solved some key problems consumers faced. Vibhore explains,

The platform isn’t about enabling people to apply to 100 jobs, or recruiters to contact 1,000 candidates. The platform is about making their intersection possible. You try to learn user behavior.

The fundamental challenge at Naukri.com is to match the disconnect between a recruiter and the job seeker. An individual’s resume is a chronicle of what they have done so far and a historical showcase of his/her competence and achievements. But when an individual is looking at job switch from the context of career progression, there’s a fair bit of aspiration and ambition, which is nowhere visible in the resume. Therefore,matching becomes difficult. The same applies for job applications as well. Naukri.com wants the users to come back to the website as often as possible in order to know them well. This will help in giving better recommendations and results.

Then there is the issue of the CV being overstuffed with information. Vibhore adds,

Naukri and startups

Naukri.com (Infoedge) has acquired three startups—TooStep, MakeSense and Ambition Box—since 2012 and continues to keep an eye on startups in the recruitment industry. Vibhore says, “It’s good to have new perspective and to be disrupted.”

Vibhore looks at three aspects of the company: what it can build, what it can defend and what it can acquire in an area where it is stronger. He doesn’t ignore anyone on the block.

Vibhore is vocal about the fact that Naukri.com is paranoid about becoming a dinosaur as an organisation and as a team, and hence these developments with startups help keep the company on its toes constantly.

content and Edit by Team MSK

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