This happened to me in the year 2005.
I was working in the human resource department of a well-known five star hotel in Juhu. We had heard that the management was planning to sell the hotel to a Delhi-based company. As an assistant manager, HR, I was earning Rs 20,000 per month then. Recruiting fresh candidates was a major part of my profile.
As days passed by I had a premonition that the hotel would be sold off to the new management by June 2005. The union did make a ruckus leading to many problems. The morale of employees, even at the senior level, was at an all-time low.
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I knew I had limited chances of survival in such an environment. After much thinking my wife and I decided to start a recruitment firm even while counting my final days at the hotel.
We had a personal computer at home and a printer too. I needed a job portal subscription to download resumes but that was not going to come cheap. I was nervous about putting my hard-earned money in this business, especially after what had happened to me at my earlier job. But I knew I had to do it to survive -- for my family and I.
So I subscribed to a lesser-known job portal on a monthly trial subscription. I had to pay just Rs 2,000 to become a subscriber. Thankfully, this amount was much smaller than Rs 35,000 quoted by other well-known job portals.
As expected I lost my job in September that year. But fortunately by then my wife was working on some small recruitment assignments she had notched through her contacts. The income, though marginal, was nevertheless a great help because as I was unemployed then.
Our business model was simple: Try the job portal and download as many resumes as we wanted and simultaneously follow up the recruitment process. By October 2005 we had got a few recruitment assignments and we closed all of them successfully.
Our hard work paid off over time as we started big-ticket recruitment for higher posts. This helped us earn a good deal of money. In November 2005 we got our first cheque of Rs 9,811. Over the next three months we earned over Rs 1.5 lakh. Later I was again able to secure a job and things returned to normal. Our annual turnover now is about Rs 20 lakh per annum.
I can only thank my wife for being so solid and supportive. Had it not been for her motivation and support we would have never seen such good days.
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Photograph: SAID KHATIB/AFP/Getty Images
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