Recruit.net said it is setting up an office in India, along an India-specific job search engine called Recruit.net India.

It’s a little late in the day for the Hong Kong-based company to set up a jobs portal in India, as it announced Wednesday. There are already a dozen or so sites in the space in India, including three that lead the way.

Leading the pack is Naukri.com (“naukri” is Hindi for “job”) with over 6 million résumés in the bag for recruiters to search. The site receives 8,000 résumés a month, according to CEO Sanjeev Bhikchandani. Monster India (which owns Jobs Ahead) comes next, followed by Jobstreet.

Recruiters want their jobs advertised on sites that draw more jobseekers. Naukri, according to Mr. Bhikchandani, has about 20,000 customers looking to hire people, while Monster India has 11,500.

With Recruit.net coming in, some amount of shakeout is inevitable. Currently more than 2 million jobs across Asia are listed on the site, encompassing most of the hot Asian job markets. Of that number, 200,000 jobs come from India, according to Recruit.net.“With the explosion in jobs and job portals, India is in dire need of consolidation to enable the jobseeker to get to his dream job in one click,” Recruit.net founder Maneck Mohan said in a statement.

“Currently he has to wade through multiple portals,” he added. “The consolidation offers a powerful benefit for employers as the probability of the right candidate looking at their requirements is higher.”

Exactly how this will be done is not clear yet, but there certainly seems to be a market for such a service.

Fight for Top Spot

The fight for the top spot in the job portals space resulted in a public spat last month, with Monster laying claim to leadership and Naukri refuting its claim.

It’s an indication of the growing competition for scarce talent. India’s universities may be producing more than 3 million graduates every year, but tech industry stalwarts lament the lack of “employability” of the majority of these (see TCS Copes with Talent Crunch).

In a study released last year entitled “Ensuring India’s Offshoring Future,” McKinsey reported that multinational companies think only 10 to 25 percent of Indian graduates are worth employing. The rest are poorly educated, or possess non-engineering degrees and have a poor knowledge of English.

In response to these findings, the Indian tech industry group Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies) is conducting tests in smaller cities and towns to tap into the best brains.

Demand for talent is surging, with software companies like Infosys, Wipro, and TCS each absorbing 20,000 new employees (or more) each year. Large multinationals such as IBM, Accenture, and EDS are all on a hiring binge as more software work moves offshore.

“We believe talent is available all over India,” said Nasscom vice president Sunil Mehta. “We need a national standard for assessing that talent.” But moving them to larger cities is not the answer.

McKinsey recommended that Indian services firms spread out throughout the country, instead of “crowding into the same few locations,” such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. The Nasscom tests may help companies find pools of talent in locations they hadn’t considered before.

Indeed, employment sites that simply list jobs and find matching candidates from a limited pool of candidates may only be helping people move from one company to another more often. New job sites will have to differentiate. Expanding into the smaller towns, following Nasscom’s lead, doesn’t seem like a bad idea, or that difficult either.

For a cash rich company like Naukri, whose parent Info Edge just raised over $37 million when it listed on the National Stock Exchange of India this week, stretching out is hardly likely to be a tough act.

Nor should it be for Monster India. With new competitor Recruit.net in the fray, the job’s going to get more challenging.