Monster.com has recently tapped into the startup ecosystem by leveraging its customer base to crowdsource funding for Indian startups. Earlier in January, the job search giant had sent out feelers to its 40 million strong user base in the form of the survey to judge their pulse on entrepreneurial ventures. "Within Monster, we were also exploring the startup space as our 49 million users have aspirations to start something of their own," told Sanjay Modi, managing director of Monster India, to Economic Times. 

This led to the launch of the umbrella ’Make India Work’ - an ecosystem of startups. The breakthrough, Modi explained, came when they started to look at their 49 million users are potential funders for startups through Angel funding and crowdsourcing.

The company also launched its new product — Social Job at Hiring — which uses Boolean capabilities to source a full picture of the the personal and the professional interests of the candidates based on their entire social footprint. This was the result of the Monster.com’s acquisition of TalentBin two years ago. “This product crawls twitter, FB, Google and gives a list of candidates based on skills as per the clients' requirement," Modi said. 

The company’s hiring solutions and its services are free for any budding entrepreneur who wants to start a venture. The idea is to also keep any incubations free until the startups have grown enough to be compared with mid-sized organizations — a point when they will have the means to look at paying.

“With mentors, funding, we are giving an entire eco-system for those wanting to work for a startup and those wanting to start one," Modi said. Monster currently has 5 mentors including Maheshwar Peri and Arunachalam Muruganantham, CEO, Jayaashree Industries, and is looking to add more. They are going for people who have at least 15 years of experience in their organization to share ideas with. Venture capitalists are also to be roped in.

Modi also revealed that the Phase-II of this move would be about taking the startups to the international market with inclusion of mentors from regional spaces like Singapore etc.

The startups initially will not fetch much capital for Monster.com but it is expected to only get bigger. 

Next stop after startups will be the blue collared segment for Monster "simply because it is the the largest and the most disorganized sector," Modi added.