India is one of the youngest nations in the world with a large chunk of its population, under the age of 35. So, if India wants to be at the pinnacle of success, this population must be employed. Every year crores of students graduate from colleges with an aim to earn and live their dreams.
Earlier, it was an easy shot for companies to find their candidates during college recruitment as the population was less and so was the competition. But today in this era of cut-throat competition, it becomes difficult for the hiring team to find the perfect guy for their company!
Every Computer Science graduate burns the midnight oil to get placed at Google or Microsoft while an Electrical/Electronics engineer wants to work with Texas instruments. So, the selection process too became complex and difficult.
Since companies can’t spend a lot of money and time on recruitment, they have found a better way to do that i.e. to just give the task to an HR company! So some other firm would do the task for you. So, let’s find out about this new venture and whether it will stabilize for the long run in the market! So, let us see the complete story behind the top HR Tech Startups in India:
Launched in 2014 by BITS Pilani alumnus Vijay Sharma. Belong is a predictive hiring platform to discover and engage high-impact talent through data science and predictive analytics. They are considered as one of the top HR-Tech companies in India.
Currently, Belong works with Amazon, Reliance Jio, Cisco, and ThoughtWorks. Belong’s machine learning algorithms help businesses discover and target high-fit talent, engage candidates through personalized interactions, and accelerate hiring cycles at scale. In 2019, the firm raised $10 million.
Darwinbox
Darwinbox Website
Established in 2015 by Jayant Paleti, Chaitanya Peddi, and Rohit Chennamaneni. Darwinbox is a cloud-based HR solutions firm. An end-to-end HR platform, Darwinbox offers solutions for recruitment, core HR processes, employee engagement, performance management, employee movement, and others.
The platform’s AI engine allows a recruiter to analyze a job description and employee profile picking up keywords to arrive at a certain ranking metric. So, if there are 400 applicants for a job, the system will shortlist about 10-15 applicants for the recruiter to talk to, which saves time, increases productivity, reduces costs, and results in better talent acquisition. The three-year-old firm serves over 100 clients, including Paytm, Ekart, Spencer’s, Delhivery, and others.
Started in 2012 by Arjun Pratap, EdGE Networks provides a suite of AI-powered products that not only auto-source, auto-screen, auto-engages the best candidates and employees for a role, but also recommend the best career path and draw up a personalized learning path for each employee.
Over six years, the team at EdGE Networks has developed productivity tools that leverage AI to help businesses address challenges in the areas of talent acquisition, workforce optimization, talent transformation, and workforce planning. The company has three enterprise solutions –Talent Analytics, Workforce Optimisation, and HIREalchemy – that cover a gamut of HR requirements.
Launched in 2014 by Abhijit Kashyape, Monjin is an on-demand interview platform that uses digital and video assessment to let candidates showcase their skills and personality, and help corporations find the right hire. On Monjin, assessments are not done by technology. Senior industry individuals review prospective employees for a company.
The interviewers and candidates are matched on the Monjin engine through AI for an interview. The clients have access to a video interview where they see the interviewer and the candidate both in the frame, the interview is indexed, rated, tagged by skill, and subskills, by behaviour and by competency. There is also a summary video as a part of an assessment, which is delivered by the expert.
Mettl
Mettl Website
Mettl’s journey began in 2009 when Co-founders Ketan Kapoor and Tonmoy Shingal came together with a common vision: leveraging technology for hiring practices in Indian and Global companies. Mettl offers recruitment assessment, programming tests, psychometric tests, aptitude tests, a pre-built test library of 200-plus tests, an interview app, vocational skills assessment, remote proctoring, deep analytics in performance management, and certification platform, among others. With a presence across 100 countries, the Gurugram-based HR tech firm has over 1,800 clients across the world.
So, this completes our list of top hr tech companies in India. If you are looking for HR startups in India, then give these startups a go! It’ll save you a lot of money and energy and find you the right candidate for your company.
FAQ
What does an HR do?
An HR or Human Resources manager looks into the well-being of the employees in the company specifically in strategic management, recruitment and training, policy formulation, risk management, labour relations, and alike.
What are some HR startups in India?
Some HR startups in India are DarwinBox, Belong, Monjin, Mettl, and EdGe Networks.
Is it compulsory to have an HR in your company?
It depends on the size of the company, if it is a small startup usually the founder takes on the responsibilities of HR as well. But for bigger established companies a separate person for HR is a must to function smoothly.
Before you can figure out how to start a recruitment agency in India first, you have to know what a recruitment agency is.
The recruitment agency is a kind of intermediate body that stands between an entity trying to find employees and a job seeker looking for a job. The main function of a recruitment agency is to find the best person for the job which recruiters are looking for.
This is why it plays an important role in job seekers as they ought to think about using a recruitment agency to search for a sort of job more quickly and with no hurdles. Any company which is in need of an immediate staffing solution can easily and effectively increase the number of employees through the help of an agency for recruitment.
A complete guide on how to start a recruitment agency business in India
Need for a Recruitment Agency
The first thing you must know prior to creating a recruitment company is what exactly is its need?
For some of the business organizations out there, the process of recruiting the ideal individuals might become a difficult and tedious assignment. Fortunately, there exist the advantages of utilizing a recruitment agency. It is pretty helpful while you have an external organization working separately and balancing all the errands of finding a candidate that the organization is looking for. Additionally, these recruitment agencies comprehend recruiting and can effectively give a check on all the candidates and limit the list down to the ideal individuals for the job.
How Recruitment Agency Functions
Then comes the question of how recruitment agencies function in various ways. The company communicates with recruitment agencies and let them know that they have a job opening for applicants. The recruiters will or find a suitable candidate through their current database or even advertise the job online to find candidates with the required qualifications. After they’ve sourced for applicants who have submitted an application already, they’ll request approval from the company’s side and then set up an interview via walk-in or online.
Get Thinking
You now know the way a recruitment agency works. It is important to consider any business that’s willing to sign a contract with you. If you already have companies in your possession, that’s fantastic, however in the event, you don’t own one, you could go to these organizations, and then approach them and have them acknowledged by your company. Make sure your company is registered so that you have the opportunity to run large companies in the near future.
When you are familiar with the above-mentioned things work will be done, you need to know the fundamental requirements for starting a recruitment agency.
Your Basic Needs
1. An Accountant
An accountant is a primary person responsible for handling your financial transactions in general as well as maintaining and analyzing all your financial documents. The majority of accountants are accountable for a variety of account-related chores. If you’re employing an accountant for your own personal requirements or for a larger company that you’ve partnered with as a recruitment agency, it is advised to retain an accountant to ensure hassle-free transactions.
The most significant factor is that you’ll require investment, no matter how big your agency is. There are a variety of things you should remember for your expenses, such as expenses, leases, kinds of equipment, the salaries of the employees you’ll keep and so on.
3. Insurance
Insurance is also required for protection to cover any damages that may have occurred to your recruitment companies. There is a variety of insurance you can pick from, including workers’ compensation insurance.
4. Market Your Agency
To make your company visible to the public, marketing is crucial. It is important to adhere to every strength you possess and also your desire to offer your company the top possible candidate it can get. Begin to promote yourself online and offline. Because it’s the time where the majority of people spend the majority of their lives on social media, you should take this opportunity to present your business to the entire world. You can join LinkedIn or Naukri.com or other sites that could be seeking companies for you.
While you’re on this, ensure that you take these things into consideration.
Setup your Objectives
The idea of starting a recruitment agency should start with setting up your goals and objectives. Take note of all the goals you need to incorporate as a recruitment agency. Your goals and objectives must be SMART i.e. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
Create a Recruitment Strategy
Then you can concentrate on creating a recruitment strategy. For that, you need to create a clear plan that will explain what you are going to do for the companies that will approach you for their recruitment process. Your strategy should align with your organisation’s objectives and should be possible to implement.
The specific law that abides the recruitment agency is the Employment Agencies Act 1973. So, for your question about how to start a recruitment agency, consider that you know this act from all the corners.
Legalize your Agency
After setting up your recruitment agency, you need to check with significant authorities or discuss with an expert and become familiar with the sort of licenses and allows required.
Though not all recruitment agencies would require a license to start their business, yet there are some exceptions. Check for the list in detail and get to know if your niche does need a license or not.
Online Apply for License for a recruitment agency
Project Management
You need to keep track of the entire project that is being incorporated into your recruitment agencies. But it might become a hectic job to do manually. Therefore, it is advisable to get software that might incur a cost.
Invest your Time
There’s a particular reason to the fact why the recruitment agencies are referred to as ‘experts’. The top recruiters produce massive amounts of expert knowledge and share this information with their clients in a straightforward manner. The business owners and hiring managers require specialists whom they can consult to get the latest pay rates, the accessibility of resources, etc. Make yourself the person your clients visit and offer it at no cost and the benefits will follow.
Conclusion
So, these are the necessities and specifications you’ll need when you’re thinking of the best way to establish a recruiting agency on your own and operate independently. I’m sure these guidelines will answer most of your concerns and assist you to get your business properly.
FAQs
How do you start a recruitment agency?
7 things that you need to know to start a recruitment agency.
Understand your basic needs.
Setup your objective.
Create a recruitment strategy.
Know the laws and regulations.
Legalize your agency.
Project management.
Invest your time.
How much does it cost to start a recruiting agency?
The price for starting a recruitment agency can vary between $60,000 to $130,000.
Are recruitment agencies profitable?
Recruitment agencies are not as profitable due to the fact that they are competitive in the marketplace.
Every student dreams of getting good grades, good college and a good life ahead. The young budding mind is curious, puzzled and still learning how the world works. The academic education and grades will only help too much, a person will need practical knowledge, certain skill set and so called “experience”. Aviate helps its Students to prepare for a job.
A freshly graduated individual struggles in finding a path, a direction to a journey he has to cross alone. The college, peers and adults in one’s life can only help through the way of giving advice, which at often times confuses the person. What these final year graduates need is the correct training about the work and skills they will need to instill in order to enter the recruitment market with the confidence and competence. As such, Aviate will guide their students in the right direction and also help them develop important and necessary skills to get a job.
Almost all the companies coming to the placement cells for recruitment are looking for students who have good communication skills and are fast learners. Why? Because they will be trained after the competitive range of interviews, GDs and tests of all sorts. Aviate provides the very same stage – a program with a vision to change the hiring market by training job-seekers on a very role-specific and organization/industry-specific that is designed in collaboration with the employers and geared to inculcate the operational as well as the soft competencies that an employer seeks for a particular job profile.
Aviate is a platform for employability-enhancement and placement services for fresh college graduates and final year college students. Aviate’s long-term vision is to disrupt the hiring market for entry-mid level roles. Aviate’s objective is to create a world where companies recruit via a train and hire model instead of the current norm of hiring people and then training them to be job-ready.
Aviate’s strategy is to train job-seekers on a very role-specific and organization/industry-specific courses that are designed in collaboration with the employers and geared to inculcate the operational as well as the soft competencies that an employer seeks for a particular job profile.
Post the training, job-seekers are thoroughly assessed (the assessments are also approved by the employers and designed to gauge a candidate-profile fit) and only the ones that make the cut are sent for interviews.
Aviate also has a retention cum mentorship programme wherein the alumni are paid a retention bonus after they complete a year with their organization. In exchange, the alumni conduct screening and mentorship sessions for incoming batch of job-seekers targeting the Alumni’s industry or profile. This also helps the alumni by granting them a sizeable supplementary income and provides the best possible mentorship to candidates aspiring for a particular role or an industry.
The advantages of the ‘train and hire’ approach for employers are-
Reduce employer’s TAT for hiring because of curation of eligible candidates made by Aviate.
Reduce the training costs and unlock a lot of opportunity costs as the candidates are job-ready.
Reduce attrition rates via its retention cum mentorship programme.
The advantages for job-seekers are-
Guaranteed Jobs for successful candidates
Successful candidates get a job offer within 24-96 hours
Employability – Enhancement by inculcation of core operational and soft skills
Supplementary income via our retention cum mentorship programme
No upfront training fee
Pan-India access to multiple job profiles and employers
Rishi is an Engineer from MIT Manipal and he also attended MBA course at MDI Gurgaon for an year before dropping Out. Previously, he worked with LetsTransport as National Sales Manager, where he scaled revenue to $10Million ARR. He also spearheaded strategic partnerships with Porsche and JW Marriot during his stint at Bidsvilla.
Kundan Kumar, an alumnus of IIT BHU (CSE) has joined Aviate as a Co-founder and CTO. Kundan is experienced in full-stack development. Kundan had Co-founded a company called Medaboss in the healthtech space and has also worked as tech lead with many organisations in the past.
“I talked to Kundan on LinkedIn when he pinged me as he was itching to work in this space as he had a very similar idea a few years ago. So I remember having several very late-night conversations with him and when we realized that our vision for the product and the business were aligned, he flew down to meet us and before long, he had put in his papers and would be joining us full-time in August as a co-founder and CTO”, Rishi informed.
In addition to the founders, Abhishek Singh is a core team member and heads the operations and online supply acquisition. Abhishek is an alumnus of IIT Dhanbad. Aviate has also made another addition in the form of Malika Bhutani to the core team as the head of community relations wherein she would lead the supply acquisition efforts.
How was Aviate Started
Rishi had faced the problem of hiring good frontline sales reps for a few organizations that he had been a part of and he used to wonder why that was the case and then one thing led to another and he started researching about the problem.
Rishi spoke to the Talent acquisition teams at several prominent BFSI, FMCG and retail companies that typically employ a large sales and operations workforce. He realized that a lot of their hiring for frontline roles is outsourced to recruitment agencies and they don’t really have a good curation mechanism.
“What I realized were three problems on the side of employers, the time taken to hire was protracted owing to a lack of good curation, the candidates needed training post-employment and weren’t job-ready and the attrition rates for these profiles was pretty high.”, said Rishi.
Rishi also spoke to a lot of placement officers across colleges in the country, students that had recently graduated or were about to in order to understand the problems at their end. Rishi also discussed it with a few friends that are entrepreneurs and some that work with a VC fund to get a sense of what they thought of the idea. By the end of last year, Rishi put in his papers at LT and decided to take a plunge and try to solve these problems.
Aviate – Name and Logo
“We just brainstormed on a couple of ideas for the name and when we zeroed in on Aviate” says Rishi.
The founder (Rishi) himself created the company’s logo.
Aviate is a pioneer in the ‘train and hire’ model. Aviate trains job-seekers on very role-specific and organization/industry-specific courses that are designed in collaboration with the employers. Post training the trainees are assessed and only those perform well are sent for interviews. To reduce attrition, Aviate also provides incentives to those alumni who complete minimum an year with an organization.
The advantages of this ‘train and hire’ model are-
Effective curation of employees. Employers can recruit from a candidate pool that is pre-trained.
Candidates are job ready even before getting hired. So the companies can skip the need for in-house training.
Reduced attrition. The alumni receive retention bonus on completion of minimum one year of job with a company, which reduces the attrition rate.
Role specific training and assessments designed in collaboration of the employers bridges skill gaps.
Aviate – User Acquisitions
Aviate’s client acquisition strategy has mostly been about identifying industries and sectors where they feel the model of hiring can create a dent and then reaching out to relevant stakeholders in the organizations to take the conversations ahead. Aviate is currently focusing on community buildingthrough campus ambassador network, internship platform and promotional events. The company is also taking help of digital marketing to reach out to potential customers.
Aviate raised a total funding of $45K in Feb, 2019.
Date
Stage
Amount
Investor
Feb 22, 2019
Angel
$45K
Sanchit Saraf, Abhimanyu Dhamija, Ravish Naresh, Pushkar Singh along with some other angels
Aviate – Startup Challenges
A major challenge for Aviate has been to build a good mechanism for offline supply acquisition. They initially started by reaching out to colleges for supply acquisition but soon realized that most colleges could care less about the placements and outcomes for their students.
“It’s so sad it isn’t even funny. Some colleges are responsive but the overwhelming majority couldn’t care less about outcomes as long as their seats are getting filled and they’re making money”, says Rishi.
Now their focus in terms of offline supply acquisition is to build a network of campus ambassadors to evangelize the cause. They also plan to launch an internship platform in order to try and get a lock-in on the supply side right from the first year of college.
Aviate – Competitors
Aviate’s model is different from the other players in this space like Manipal pro-learn or times learning etc. Rishi, is fairly sure that some great companies would emerge in this space. However, he thinks what Lambda has achieved is quite remarkable and investors and entrepreneurs alike have shown quite an interest in creating an Indian clone of Lambda. They will be watching this space with great interest specially to see if and how the Income sharing Agreement model works in India.
However, there are several companies and entrepreneurs that Rishi finds inspirational like Larry Ellison (oracle), Divyank Turakhia (directi, Media.net), Nithin Kamath (Zerodha), Ashish Kashyap (Goibibo, INDwealth) among several others.
“Tech-enabled/tech-based recruitment has seen a few interesting companies but none have managed to solve the problem at scale except Naukri. It is a little odd that none of the startups founded post 2010 have made a dent in the market in terms of the scale that naukri enjoys. In terms of skill development, the market has tinkered with a train and hire model however we feel that no one has really created a model that hinges on incentive-alignment of all stakeholders. We do think a lot of interesting plays will emerge in the broader recruitment and skill-development space.”, says Rishi.
Aviate – Advisors and Mentors
Aviate is being mentored by Pushkar Singh (Co-founder Let’s Transport) and Ravish Naresh (Co-founder Khatabook and housing).
Aviate has signed up clients and has commenced training and hiring for them. The immediate focus for the next years is to create a wide array of content that enables them to create a broader base of profiles and roles as they feel this will trigger a positive feedback loop with tremendous network effects.
Depth and breadth of content and job-types would lead to a better supply and a better supply would lead to better demand from clients. Kick-starting and optimizing this feedback loop is their immediate focus.
Aviate – FAQs
What is Aviate?
The Aviate platform provides college graduates and final-year students with employability-enhancing and placement services.
Who are the founders of Aviate?
Rishi Raj Rahul is the founder and CEO of Aviate and Kundan Kumar is the co-founder and CTO.
Where is the headquarters of Aviate?
Bomanhalli, Bengaluru, Karnataka, 560068, India.
What is the total Funding and who are the investors of Aviate?
Total funding is – $45K in Feb, 2019. Invested by Angel investors – Sanchit Saraf, Abhimanyu Dhamija, Ravish Naresh, Pushkar Singh along with some other angels.
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 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
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.
HackerEarth was founded by Sachin Gupta and Vivek Prakash in 2012.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 –
A standalone Application Tracking Software (ATS) that takes care of the end-to-end recruitment needs of your organizations, or
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vibhavari Madki
