Meet the man who is helping multinationals like Dell and Wipro save millions a day
Editor-Hiumansu sekhar samal
Arjun Pratap (40) admits to having no background in HR whatsoever.
This may come as a bit of a surprise to people who know what he does
successfully now.
Arjun Pratap, Founder & CEO, EdGE Networks
But before that, Arjun worked in the music sector; the content delivery space, with Speedera Networks (later bought by Akamai Technologies),
as well as e-learning. He then chose to start on his own, in the
digital education space. However, challenges of partnering with
universities and high churn rates caused him to lose his team and
eventually shut shop. But, as they say, when you can’t connect the dots looking forward,
you can only connect them while looking backwards. And Arjun did just
that. After giving it much thought, in October 2013, he sprung back with
an automated, artificial intelligence (AI) platform, helping firms with
quick talent acquisition as well as workforce optimisation solutions.
He says,
While building my business, hiring was always seen as a
challenge, especially the unattended piles and volumes of resumes. At
that point, out of personal experience, I actively asked myself, ‘what
if my candidate or potential lies in those unattended volumes’.
Today, his HR automation platform HireAlchemy (under its parent brand
EdGE Networks) is an active part of the recruitment process for five
multinationals firms in India, including names like Wipro, HCL, Dell and
Microland etc.
So, how does it work?
Arjun Pratap
Before understanding how the platform works for talent acquisition,
one needs to understand the process of talent sourcing in the Indian
market.Unlike the markets in the US, the Indian market outsources the
sourcing of resumes. These ‘sourcing agents’ sit on job websites like
Naukri or Monster, and fire a Boolean query. Say, to find a Java
developer here, the sourcing agent receives thousands of resumes and
profiles which are downloaded and dumped on to the recruiter. However,
the process still remains inefficient, owing to the high volumes of
resumes which recruiters have to go through. Another big gap is that these sourcing agents have little or no understanding of nuance that recruiters seek.
But for Arjun, the art lay in creating the right query. HireAlchemy automates the process, end to end, by reading the
complete job description through neuro-linguistic programming, and
automatically creating the right query, filtering through multiple
parameters. On finding the matches, the platform goes further to read the
resumes, rank them and create scores based on the parameters met.
Further, the scoring helps recruiters understand better and equips them
to question candidates on the missing parameters. In the final stage of the process, the platform automatically sends
e-mails to the shortlisted candidates, tracking it to gauge the interest
of the individual. If the mail is ignored or unopened, the recruiter
knows that the job doesn’t appeal to the candidate. According to the founder, this process will soon to be done over the
phone, where candidates can also be called to seek their interest for
the opening. The application development team at HireAlchemy
Smart ‘workforce’ manager
But that’s not where the majority of the revenues come from for the business. Arjun tells us that their internal resource management tool contributes 85-90 percent of their revenue. In a normal scenario, IT businesses lose a major chunk of their costs
to benched employees, while being unable to allocate a resource for a
requirement in due time. On an average, it takes close to 15-16 days for
multinationals to allocate a resource internally, hence losing out
almost $800,000- 1.5 million to their customers everyday. HireAlchemy platform reads an employee’s structured data, including
certification, roles and skill training information, as well as
unstructured data, including work experience summary, targets achieved
and appraisal summaries, to find the right match for a requirement
internally. Arjun claims that the platform helps its clients allocate the right
resource to shops or projects within 8-9 days, saving millions in the
process. On a larger front, this reading and curation of data also equips the
platform to predict trends in hiring for not just job portals (like
Monster or Naukri) but also for their clients internally. Dashboard for the internal resource management tool
Where’s the moolah?
The firm charges its customers based of the number of profiles and job descriptions scanned. The
founder tells us that for talent acquisitions, the platform scans
40,000 -50,000 job descriptions, followed by 1,500-2,000 profiles
monthly. While internally this number multiplies to 20,000 job
descriptions and 150,000 profile scans for internal resource allocation. According to the founder, the average ticket size for the firm is anywhere between $200,000 and $500,000.
By May this year, the firm is looking to close its Series-A funding
from a mix of Indian and US-based investors. The startup is also looking
to kickstart its operations in London, Canada and Silicon Valley in the
coming six months. The talent acquisition platform scoring candidate resumes
AI a reality in India?
If we look at Silicon Valley, AI seems to be the hottest sector in town. According to Markets&Markets,
AI is touted to become a $5.05-billion market by 2020, while growing at
CAGR of 53.65 percent (2015 onwards). Maybe that’s why Indian deep
learning and machine learning startups like HyperVerge and SnapShoppr are making their way to the Valley. With giants like Google and IBM (through Watson) already having
forayed into the domain, the Indian software market is also not behind
with TCS launching Ignio last June, Wipro launching its cognitive
computing system Holmes, and Infosys launching the AiKiDo project. But India still needs to understand the true essence of AI.
Automating tasks (or repetitive patterns) through just sifting data, is
no less than just plain automation (added to analytics or big data).
This doesn’t qualify as real AI, with the core of the technology lying
in imitating human intelligence alongside intuition. Website: www.edgenetworks.in
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