StartupTalky

Tag: recruitment industry

  • HackerEarth – Crowdsourcing Solutions from the Developers’ Community!

    As it is correctly said, people who solve problems the best have suffered the most. Similarly, Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash being app developers themselves launched their startup HackerEarth in 2012 with the motive to build an entirely meritocratic system using a sufficiently objective measure for an app developer’s skills.

    Their initiative was driven by the fact that the number of technology employment opportunities are growing at an exponential rate. And with the advent of digitization, more and more jobs are being available to Information Technology (IT) professionals. Still, there are a bunch of app developers who do not get the job they deserve.

    HackerEarth – Company Highlights

    Startup Name HackerEarth
    Headquarter San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US
    Sector Edtech and Recruiting Platform
    Founders Sachin Gupta, Vivek Prakash
    Founded 2012
    Parent Organization HackerEarth Inc.
    Website hackerearth.com

    About HackerEarth and How it Works
    HackerEarth – USP and Innovation
    Founders of HackerEarth and team
    How was HackerEarth Started?
    HackerEarth – Startup Launch
    HackerEarth – Business Model and Revenue Model
    HackerEarth – Startup Challenges
    HackerEarth – Funding and Investors
    HackerEarth – Growth
    HackerEarth – Future Plans

    Check out this List of EdTech Startups in India | Emerging Education Startups

    About HackerEarth and How it Works

    HackerEarth mainly focuses on crowd sourcing solutions from the developers’ community. So, it ideally provides enterprise software solutions that help organizations to manage the firm with effective innovation and solve their technical recruitment needs.

    HackerEarth Logo
    HackerEarth Logo

    They also have launched a second version of the innovation management software. This new version focuses on creating a holistic innovation management unit within the company itself. This, in turn, paves the way for enhancing greater creativity and a culture of innovation in the organization. Also, the new version puts extra focus on security, customization, and verticalization of the product across various industries.

    All in all, HackerEarth’s innovation management software is a superiorly indispensable platform for enterprises that helps them to tackle various problems through internal and external audiences respectively.

    HackerEarth – USP and Innovation

    • HackerEarth holds a community of more than 2 million-plus app developers coming from more than 57 countries backed by robust platforms to swiftly drive superior innovation in the industry.
    • HackerEarth also has launched an initiative where they enable enterprises to host innovation challenges for business-related problems and the startups can participate. This initiative is called Startup Connect.
    • The startups who perform well are shortlisted and get a chance to work with enterprises to co-create creative and innovative solutions.

    Also read: Aviate – Making College Students Job Ready

    Founders of HackerEarth and team

    HackerEarth was founded by Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash in 2012.

    Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash are founders of HackerEarth
    Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash

    Both of the co-founders, Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash, are hardcore programming graduates from IIT Roorkee. And both of them at different points interned and also worked with Microsoft and Google

    Sachin Gupta, CEO, and Co-founder – Having been a startup founder for most of his professional life, Sachin Gupta is an entrepreneur by heart. He claims that he absolutely loves doing whatever it takes to build a company and is powerfully driven by things that challenge him.

    Vivek Prakash, CTO, and Co-founder – A programmer at heart, a dual degree holder in computer sciences. Vivek leads the Information Management Group at IIT Roorkee and has also been a part of Google Summer of Code program.

    Currently with 120 members, HackerEarth has close to 45 people in engineering, 15 marketers, and 25 sales representatives, with the rest in operations.

    How was HackerEarth Started?

    Like many other startups, HackerEarth also started in the dorm room. These two individual’s passion for app development was at an all-time high when they were in college. Taking the same passion forward, they thought that it’d be a great idea to build a product that cultivates the culture of coding amongst the students in India.

    And that’s how they came up with MyCareerStack. After its huge success, they again put their passion for driving seat and thought of exploiting the problems that companies face while recruiting. And to create a solution to this, they launched HackerEarth.

    Relevant read: Skillate- Solving the Complications of Recruitment Flawlessly

    HackerEarth – Startup Launch

    HackerEarth penetrated in the market with the strategy for creating programming courses to majorly serve two purposes:

    • To enable the programmers to practice and learn code.
    • And to allow the programmers to compete with other programmers through exciting and meaningful contests.

    HackerEarth has created some interesting programming challenges with certain levels of difficulty which appeal to all the developers on a global level. They are called Hackathons.

    Hackathons provide a great platform for developers to showcase their talent. These type of programs keeps the programmers engaged and allows them to practice and learn code in a fun way. At HackerEarth, the range of learning varies from basic concepts to advanced ones. The basic concepts include modules like Algorithms and Data structures and the advanced concepts include modules like Machine Learning.

    HackerEarth – Business Model and Revenue Model

    So ideally, there are two products that HackerEarth has to offer. Both the products are essentially sold as SaaS:

    • HackerEarth Sprint– It is an innovation management software that helps companies drive creativity and innovation through internal and external talent pools. This includes its global community of 2M+ developer and they work with large enterprises, SMBs, Universities, and Government entities to help them effectively solve their innovation needs.
    • HackerEarth Recruit– This is a more on the technology side. It is a technical recruitment interface that helps in optimum technical talent screening which allows its clients to build a strong and proficient team.

    HackerEarth – Startup Challenges

    The biggest challenge for HackerEarth like any other startup is to scale the programmers and keep them engaged on HackerEarth. It seems like stronger the hub, easier is the business operations. So for HackerEarth, everything stems from the hub and scaling it across the world is the biggest hurdle to toss.

    Relevant read: How Hiring is Affected due to Coronavirus Outbreak?

    HackerEarth – Funding and Investors

    HackerEarth has raised a total of $11.5M in funding over 5 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Nov 1, 2018 from a Series B round.

    Here is a list of all the funding rounds of HackerEarth-

    Date Stage Amount Investor
    June 2013 Venture Round – –
    February 2014 Seed Round $500K Prime Venture Partners
    April 2014 Seed Round – –
    February 2017 Series A $4.5 Million DHI Group Inc
    November 2018 Series B $6.5 Million –

    HackerEarth – Growth

    • HackerEarth’s corporate client’s list is seamlessly unending. This list includes huge companies like Wipro and Adobe.
    • Since the launch to now, HackerEarth has been growing exponentially. Now, they are a team of 120+ people, are catering to more than doubled user base and grew their revenues 5X.
    • Also, HackerEarth has grown into a global community of 2+ million developers driving creativity and innovation to the field like a force.

    Also read: Colangels – Connecting you with right people

    HackerEarth – Future Plans

    • Expanding the brand presence across other countries with a prime focus on US, Europe, and SouthEast Asia is number one on the list of HackerEarth’s plans.
    • HackerEarth is aiming to be the largest platform for developers. Hence their long term plan is to add over a million more programmers to this community over the next few years.

    “This is the right time for us to look at markets overseas, when our India business is still growing, rather than a time when we are reaching saturation in this market. At present, 85 percent of our revenues come from India and 15 percent from international markets. In three years, we see this balancing out to a 50-50.”, said Sachin Gupta, co-founder of HackerEarth.

  • Skillate- Solving the Complications of Recruitment Flawlessly

    Recruitment is a tough process and it’s not just today but it always has been. Intending to make recruitment Easy, Fast and Transparent, Bipul Vaibhav, Anand Baranwal, and Kumar Sambhav launched Skillate in 2016. The whole idea behind this venture is to shift the focus of recruitment teams “from the ‘how’ to the ‘who’, i.e. process automation to candidate recommendation.”

    Skilliate HighLights

    Startup Name Skilliate
    Headquarter Bangalore
    Sector HR Tech
    Founders Bipul Vaibhav, Anand Baranwal, Kumar Sambhav
    Founded 2016
    Website skillate.com

    Skilliate Details

    Skillate – About and How it works
    Skillate- USP and Innovation
    Skillate – Target Market Size
    Skillate – Founders and Team
    Skillate – How did skilliate start?
    Skillate – Startup Launch
    Skillate – Business Model and Revenue Model
    Skillate – Startup Challenges
    Skillate – Funding and Investors
    Skillate – Advisors and Mentors
    Skillate – Growth
    Skillate – Future Plans

    Skillate – About and How it works

    Skillate is an advanced decision-making engine to make hiring easy, fast, and transparent. The AI-based platform helps in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment, beginning from creating the job requisition, to resume matching, to candidate engagement. Skillate can work as both –

    1. A standalone Application Tracking Software (ATS) that takes care of the end-to-end recruitment needs of your organizations, or
    2. As an intelligent system that integrates with your existing ATS to make your recruitment easy, fast, and transparent.

    Skillate solutions are solving the following problems:

    • Candidate sourcing: Skillate’s new-age sourcing methodology continuously expands your central database through a connected network of resources: job boards, emails, ATS, consultancies, referrals, career pages, etc. Skillate solutions help you utilize your central database better.
    • Candidate screening: Skillate Chatbot and AI-powered matching, thinks like a recruiter and provides AI-backed scores for candidates based on education, experience, and skill levels. The intelligent platform provides ‘much beyond a keyword match’, and understands patterns and context to ensure that you never miss out on a quality candidate.
    • Candidate experience: The Conversational AI of our chatbot automates communication and creates personalized candidate experiences at scale. It captures information beyond resumes (for ex.- shift and relocation readiness) and keeps the information repository fresh. Our JD assistant, on the other hand, gives real-time feedback to recruiters on their JD and helps them in writing detailed job descriptions to attract the best candidates.

    Also Read: Top 6 Ways ChatBot For Business Can Help You

    Skillate- USP and Innovation

    Skillate has trained its system with over 20 million diverse profiles and has 15+ paying clients. Working with it, the clients have achieved the following benefits:

    • Reducing hiring time by 65%
    • Cost per hire by more than 30%
    • 40% Lesser Interviews
    • 2.2x conversions

    Some other prominent USP’s are:

    • The AI-based solutions are ‘self-learning’ and provide improved results over time
    • Skillate is secured and is working with some of the biggest enterprises across sectors
    • Skillate integrates with existing ATSs like Success Factor and Taleo to help organizations with a smooth transition
    • Skillate works efficiently at scale. The platform processes 5 Lakh resumes screening in 4 seconds
    • Skillate is the official partner of SAP

    Skillate – Target Market Size

    The Recruitment Industry in India is growing at 21% per year and is approximately worth Rs. 35,000 crores as per Executive Recruiters Association and Ernst & Young. The global recruitment software market size was valued at US$ 1,753.2 Mn in 2017 and is projected to reach US$ 3,095.8 Mn by the end of 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 7.4%, according to Fortune Business Insights.

    The technology landscape is dynamic. Currently, traditional products like Workday, SuccessFactors, etc. are used by enterprises. Even though these solutions promise end-to-end management of the recruiting process, there are gaping holes that need to be filled. Solutions that use cutting edge technology along with the power of AI to integrate with these existing platforms can solve some real pain points of the industry. New players like Skillate, Talview, HackerEarth, Leena AI, KPISoft, Xoxoday, etc. are centering themselves around a mother platform to make the entire recruitment experience seamless.

    “People Analytics” and “Offer to Joining Ratio” are two new problems of this decade. Diversity and Inclusion is one of the core agendas for all the large enterprises today, and it is a global mandate to implement this at scale. The industry has started talking about the Quality of Hire and Reduced TAT by leveraging technology. The world is expecting to see some great innovation happening in these areas. So, in general, there are exciting times ahead. In the next 5 years, the industry will talk about analytics in the HR function by leveraging tools like Tableau or Power BI the way we do it in Sales, Marketing, or Operations.

    Skillate – Founders and Team

    The founders Skillate are Bipul Vaibhav, Anand Baranwal, and Kumar Sambhav. Sambhav and Bipul are friends from their college days. Sambahv was more into technology, and Bipul always had a great sense of business. When they decided to start their venture, Anand, who was living with them as their flatmate, decided to join in. Anand was working in Tracxn then as an analyst and had developed a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem during his research.

    Bipul Vaibhav, Co-founder, and CEO, Skillate- At Skillate, Bipul is responsible for AI, Investment, and overall business growth of Skillate. Before founding Skillate, Bipul worked as a Data Scientist at DataWeave Software Pvt Ltd, where he developed a machine learning model to classify the product categories of e-commerce products. He also worked as an advanced software engineer with Burning Glass Technologies for a little less than a year. Bipul holds a B. Tech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati. He has co-authored a paper on an autonomous river cleaning robot and a model for video classification using semantic keywords. He holds research publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence at International Forums like SPIE and IEEE. Bipul is passionate about Cricket, Reading books, and Building software products.

    Bipul Vaibhav, Co-founder, and CEO, Skillate

    Anand Baranwal, Co-founder, Skillate – As one of the co-founders of Skillate, Anand’s primary role/responsibility is to drive business and growth at Skillate. He is responsible for Business Development, Marketing, and Hiring the right talent for his company. Before co-founding Skillate, Anand has had extensive experience as an analyst with Tracxn where he engaged with the FinTech industry in the Southeast Asia region. He has also managed projects for JSW Steel Ltd. Anand graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Production and Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Anand’s specialization skills lie in the areas of Business Development and Operations activities. Anand’s passion is to find and meet like-minded people to learn and grow in all aspects of life.

    Kumar Sambhav, Co-founder, Skillate – Sambhav is the Co-founder at Skillate and he is responsible for strategy, roadmap, and feature definition of the product to deliver unique value to our clients. Before Skillate, Kumar was involved in software development at Capillary Technologies. He was working in the product that handles the campaign management and subscription management for the client. Sambhav holds a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati. He specializes in software design and system architecture which varies from the backend to the front part of the application. He is passionate about music and plays guitar in his spare time. He has a sports bug and plays Tennis and Table Tennis.

    Currently, the Skillate team is made up of 25+ dynamic individuals with expertise in different domains. Skillate management is flexible with working hours and doesn’t believe in micromanagement. There is just one criterion to join the Skillate team- behave like an entrepreneur while respecting the team dynamics.

    Also Read: How to Hire CTO for Your Startup

    Skillate – How did it start?

    In January 2015, Bipul was working for an analytics software company in Chennai. Unhappy with his role, Bipul contacted various organizations with openings, but to no avail. The frustrating part was not that he was getting rejected, but that often, he would simply not receive any response from the recruiters. He had no clarity on what stage his applications were getting rejected, or even if they were noticed at all!

    This got Bipul thinking about the lack of transparency prevalent in the recruitment process. He realized that even though candidates desperately want a response from the company on the stature of their candidature, large corporations often don’t have the time and bandwidth to respond to every candidate at each stage of the hiring process. With corporate firms receiving millions of applications every year, the unstructured hiring process not only keeps the candidates in the dark but also deprives organizations of the best talents.

    This led Bipul with his co-founders – Sambhav and Anand to form Skillate, an AI-based platform that makes recruitment Easy, Fast, and Transparent with its cutting edge technology.

    Skillate – Startup Launch

    In the beginning, when the co-founders had only tested the platform on LinkedIn profiles, they connected to an HR manager through a mutual connection and collected about 1600 resumes. “We tested our algorithms on these resumes and failed miserably! We were shocked. It was one of the days when we doubted if we should go ahead with our product or not.” Says Bipul Vaibhav.

    However, rather than giving up, the team went back to the drawing board and revisited the basics of the technology they had created. They understood that to truly make AI work in a complex industry like recruitment, they will need to consider the human element of resume making.

    For example, they can’t just feed the machine with names and expect that it will understand the context. Let’s say a candidate has written his address as “next to Lakshmi road”. The machine needs to understand that here ‘Lakshmi’ is the name of the street and not a person as it normally would be.

    Similarly, as they tested more and more resumes, they understood some of the different patterns of resumes. Simple elements, like mail id and contact information, are placed at different places by different candidates. And then they trained the algorithms to identify elements like that.

    After this, the first person they spoke to was Tanuj Choudhry from HomeLane and Anuj Agarwal from zyoin. They had a deep understanding of the recruitment industry and came from a rich technical background. Then the founders started with finalizing a set of target organizations and sent highly personalized emails to the decision-makers so that they can trust the product as well as them. In the early stage, founders must make themselves as credible as they want their product to be. Apart from the personalized emails, in-depth market research helped them in understanding the pain points of our customers. Word of mouth and reference from existing clients also played a crucial role in acquiring new clients since they were highly satisfied with the product.

    Skillate – Business Model and Revenue Model

    Skillate charges on a yearly subscription model, depending on the size of the company.

    Skillate – Startup Challenges

    Recruitment as an industry still plays by the old rules. Convincing the team that heads technology can make their work easier and more efficient was a challenge. Even after Skillate’s solutions convinced them, adoption in the company remained an issue. Also, it’s dashboard’s highly intuitive design, along with our committed customer success team, ensured that adopting the Skillate platform was a smooth process with little training to the recruitment team.

    Skillate – Funding and Investors

    In October 2019, Skillate raised its pre-Series A funding of $1 Million from investors like Mynavi Corporation, Incubate Fund, and Whatfix Founders, among others.

    Also Read: Top Funded Startups India

    Skillate – Advisors and Mentors

    The advisors and mentors of Skillate are:

    • Shraddhanjali Rao – Head HR – SAP, India, Partner to the business
    • Abhijit Bhaduri – ex-Chief learning Officer – Wipro.

    Skillate – Growth

    Skillate is working with some of the biggest enterprises of the country, including the likes of Yes Bank, OYO, Saint-Gobain, L&T Financial Services, Software AG, RBL Bank, Liberty Insurance, Bigbasket, etc.

    Skillate – Future Plans

    “International expansion is one of our key focus areas, especially in the US. As we expand, we are making our product multi-lingual and more scalable so that it can handle even more volume.” Concluded Bipul Vaibhav.

  • How Hiring is Affected due to Coronavirus Outbreak?

    Coronavirus outbreak has already affected many sectors of human life right from restaurants, food chains, tourism, airlines, sporting events to film industry also which is eventually leading to economic slowdown in many countries. While the various countries are continuing to prepare and practice social distancing and self-quarantine during this COVID-19 pandemic, companies are looking for workers to help restock empty shelves and deliver orders to home-bound customers.  In addition to this, of course, Coronavirus outbreak is also having a significant impact on the jobs market, employers plans to hire and the recruitment industry as a whole, experts have warned. Many industry executives & experts have stated their views towards coronavirus impact on  recruitment industry and hiring.

    What Experts say about Impact on Recruitment –

    Lee Biggins – CEO and the founder of CV-Library
    Lee Biggins has stated, “No doubt that the Coronavirus outbreak will have significant consequences for the recruitment industry as a whole”. He further added, “We’re already hearing feedback that employers​ are pausing their hiring plans while they wait for the worst to pass.”
    Steve Blank – a retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator
    Steve has said, “It’s no longer business as usual for the rest of the economy. In fact, shutting down the economy for a pandemic has never happened. Millions of jobs may be lost in the next few months, as entire industries are devastated, something not seen since the Great Depression of 1929-39. I hope I’m very wrong, but the social and economic impacts of this virus are likely to be profound and will change how we shop, travel, and work for years.”
    Kamal Karanth – Co-founder of staffing solutions provider Xpheno
    Karanth has said, “Several India entry projects are getting or likely to get postponed. Senior-level hiring, which is considered as critical hiring in any industry and usually remains insulated from various other factors, is likely to be pushed back for some months.”
    Jamie Dimon –  CEO of JPMorgan Chase
    Jamie Dimon has quoted that it expected the U.S. economy to contract in the first two quarters of the year, which would meet a common definition of a recession.

    Also Read: Effect of Coronavirus Crisis on Employment

    Many companies to Freeze their Hiring operations

    According to reports, employment in Britain hit a record high in January before the Coronavirus outbreak but now the country is facing for a great wave of job losses. According to official figures, hiring of many firms & companies has been frozen there amid the crisis. Some companies have moved to freeze hiring until the economic impact of the virus is made clear, but many others are continuing to recruit in a bid to prevent a business slowdown. Several companies in India and across the world have already cancelled or postponed interviews. Some of them are turning to video calls, where possible, as they are unable to travel for face-to-face interactions, which is important in senior hires. Many reports state that hiring is likely to be delayed or pushed back by at least a quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic forces companies to suspend projects and find immediate ways to cope with the situation.

    Usually, hiring of senior or top executives such as chief executives and operations and finance chiefs is also likely to be delayed by quarter as companies and senior executives are unable to travel. As senior-level hiring needs significant face-to-face interaction to get known about the candidate, interviews are getting pushed and indefinitely postponed. Similarly, the startup are also going to be affected due to coronavirus outbreak.  For instance, in the startup ecosystem, hiring has been decided based on the growth plans they have but now many of them are unable to proceed further because They have fewer cash reserves and a smaller margin of error for managing sudden downturns. The ripple and feedback effect of all of these closures will have a major impact on country’s  economy as each industry that gets impacted puts people out of work  and those laid off workers don’t buy products and services. While according to some experts, the real impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on hiring in India will take 3-4 weeks to gauge.

    Many Companies are still Recruiting Candidates

    It’s important to note that the candidate market has always been competitive pre-coronavirus and companies have continued to take their time to process candidates and hire the best person for the job. That’s not going to change ever.  As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect economies across the globe, few industries still have been left untouched by the fallout, and that’s having huge implications not only for the workforce but also the recruitment process. Many experts said that there is still hope for the recruitment industry, as many employers would continue to hire for essential roles and some sectors – such as health and social care and logistics were already recruiting more workers.

    Also Read: Companies are Asking their Employees to Work from Home due to CoronaVirus

    Lately, online e-commerce giant Amazon made headlines when the company announced it is looking to hire 100,000 workers for warehouse and delivery positions. Meijer, American Supermarket company, is also hiring additional seasonal team members in each of their stores to meet the demands of the business. Cosco says it to is looking for workers to help keep its inventory moving to meet customer demand. Walmart is looking for employees to add to its delivery drivers.

    All above information just comes down to the fact that Not every industry slows down in an economic downturn and not every company within an industry slows down. The bottom line is people get hired during layoffs and hires happen even when things slow down. Hiring will speed up or slow down within an organization based on their strategic plans for the year not solely because of a virus.