Not many product ideas travel the distance from college to an MVP. Bengaluru-based Jobspire has not only done that but has gone a step ahead and snapped up USD 262K funding as well. The product was first envisioned when Mohak Dhingra, Sandesh Kini, Varun Mayya, Kartik Luke Singh, were still in their 7th semester at Manipal Institute of Technology. The founders claim to have built a full fledged, scalable product from day one. The beta version of the product was launched in March 2015.
Now after getting funding, Jobspire has evolved into a sophisticated platform providing end-to-end recruiting solutions which includes sourcing, matching, decision making and tracking for Indian startups.
Rs 30 lakh in 3rd year of college!
During their second year of college, Varun and Kartik both being coders decided to sell out their development services online on oDesk and eventually moved off the platform and started with bigger projects. They had over Rs 30 lakh in revenue in the third year of college. At the same time, Varun and Kartik worked on fleshing out the concept of Jobspire. Varun brought his batchmates Sandesh and Mohak onboard to handle product and sales respectively and the rest is history.
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Mohak said, “Our outsider perspective gave us a few advantages as well but over the last eight months we’ve made an effort to understand the industry better.”
Why Jobspire?
According to Mohak, a lot of companies in the hiring space follow the same pattern of dishing out new matching algorithms, but their expenditure on acquisition was still really high as their products were not as exciting. The four co-founders were keen to infuse the elements of excitement and virality into the recruitment industry.
“We could’ve built a fin-tech or food-tech app and solved people’s needs for a few minutes a day, but Jobspire is our opportunity to shape what a person does every single day for years,” Varun said.
Mohak and the other co-founders didn’t find the CV effective and analysed the top 22 job roles in India to develop a 5 minute subjective challenge for each job role. This was aimed at giving recruiters a mental snapshot of every candidate. They as well introduced an audio verification system which helped candidates bypass their initial round of interviews online.
How does it work?
While some companies source from Jobspire, other companies use their curating services or even replace their careers page with their Jobspire page. Smaller companies use it as a platform to help them get discovered.
Jobspire uses both technology and human recruiters to assist companies hire Generation Y talent. Jobspire claims that its solution comprising ‘manual and algorithmic curation’ solves the problem of DNA-matchmaking a candidate to the company and ensures that top candidates get offers only from premium companies.
The top 5 of the candidates get into an invite/referral only ‘Premium Talent’ database. It pays the candidates three per cent of their CTC (cost to company) when they successfully land a job.
Jobspire is experimenting with pay-per-hire, as well. Mohak says, “Pivoting into a subscription model is easy, but the real challenge (and value for everyone using the system) comes from cracking pay per hire.”