NEW YORK: There are portals for real estate, matrimony, personal finance and what have you targeting NRIs, but this one takes the cake. A Virginia-based company is doing a match making between H1B visa professionals and IT consulting companies both online and on ground.An NRI has developed a web based technology solution with the hope to help bench candidates.

There are many job portals, but nothing is available to support this multi billion dollar subcontracting industry primarily owned by Indian Americans, says Prabakaran Murugaiah who launched Corp-Corp.com, a web portal to help IT recruiters in the US to find the right H1B candidates. It claims that better utilization of the existing workforce can reduce the shortage of manpower being felt in the industry.

"If the right people are reached and utilized, minimizing candidates' time on the bench, the IT work force can be increased by as much as 20 percent," Murugaiah says. "Besides, when client needs are fulfilled, unproductive time between projects is cut short, improving the bottom line of the company. We know how difficult it is now to get fresh H1B and last year there were three times more applications than the prescribed quota.

"The missing link, Murugaiah explained, is an integration tool among consulting companies to share their resources online. Corp-Corp.com's FETCH technology solution can help the consulting companies to clear the bench candidates quickly by finding more requirements from the market. "Our FETCH technology is 100 times better than the typical search process," he avers. More than 6,000 IT recruiters are using this portal already, Murugaiah claimed.

Corp-Corp.com is organizing one seminar every month across the US for IT consulting companies. More than 100 executives from various firms attended previous events, many of the participants acknowledged that they were facing difficulties in finding contracts for their consultants quickly. But at the same time a shortage of skilled professionals has also been reported. Corp-Corp.com plans to host a networking seminar on Feb 15 in Dallas and on March 22 in San Jose following the success of hosting such events in Edison, NJ, Chicago and Virginia.

The US economy is heading to recession, but the unemployment in IT industry is less than 2 percent and still there is a huge demand for skilled IT workers. An estimated 500,000 Indian IT workers are in US, mostly on H1B. Despite huge demand, many Indian IT consultants who are on H1B looking for projects through their sponsoring employers, he says."IT temporary staffing industry is primarily supporting major technology implementation projects, new developments and migration from legacy systems. Even top IT consulting companies may not have available consultants for all their projects, all the time. So it is necessary to source the IT consultants from other companies on subcontract basis.

There are 1000's of companies, 1000's consultants and 1000's of contracts, still there is a bench time and extensive time to find the consultant from the market. The missing link is integration tool to match needs of both ends. Creating centralized resource sharing system will enable companies and consultants to fulfil their needs immediately," he says."All job portals are enabling employers to find employees.

We create new employment opportunity. Corp-Corp.com is designed to integrate companies for sharing the available resources on contingency basis. We create a new business relationship between corporations. We empower the IT consulting business by expanding their business through other partners," he says.

"We have about 7000 IT recruiters currently signed up with us. We plan to have 25,000 recruiters before end of this year. We are in the market for just a year and we are growing at 50 percent every quarter. IT staffing companies who are looking for contract resources from other companies can signup with us. If they have resources they post the resumes, if they have contracts they can post the contracts, our FETCH engine will match their needs provide all available resources within 30 seconds."We reduce our expenses and pass the savings to our customers. Our major customer support division is operating from Tirunelveli, in Tamil Nadu.

We focus only IT temporary staffing industry, due to the nature of the business most of the client needs are filled by H1B temporary work visa consultants. Most of IT companies either directly or indirectly use the H1B consultants for their needs. So obviously most of our customers do sponsor H1B temporary visas," he says. "Similar conferences in India have proved to be a big hit and we held such meets in Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai this year."