Talent engagement platform Huntshire launches 'Marketing Challenges'

Huntshire is a talent engagement platform backed by T-Labs and also a TechSparks company. The company has launched 'Marketing Challenges' - a tool for companies to crowdsource new ideas for marketing. The idea can be anything - a product launch, a market segmentation problem or even a sales strategy.Talking about the idea, co-founder Shankar Ganapathy says, “Initially we built this platform as another means of assessing talent, i.e. companies can give tasks, students can submit solutions, and get their friends to ‘kudo’ (upvote) their solution. Some companies started using this tool to get new ideas for many of their internal challenges. Here is where the idea was born.” The tool was used by companies to know the thought process of the candidates and also the extent to which job applicants will go to promote their application. The marketing challenge tool gives companies a separate platform to crowdsource marketing challenges.

Fusion Charts has a challenge running at the moment where they are seeking solutions for building a campaign to increase engagement with developers. The solution is visible to all and the answer receives kudos/upvotes. “The leader board shows the names of people who have submitted a solution and the number of kudos they have got. The idea is to gamify the process and make people share their solutions in an effort to get more visibility. This also means that the challenge will get more eyeballs,” says Shankar.

Huntshire was founded in the middle of 2012 by three techies who wanted to solve the 'hiring problem' for companies. They started out with conducting 'hunts' from where they have slowly moved on to becoming a talent engagement platform for companies. Shankar doesn't reveal the size of the talent pool but says, “We do have many folks from almost all IIMs, XLRI, ISBs among B-Schools. We also have students from IITs and NITs and 400+ engineering colleges in our talent pool.”

Talent engagement involves active outreach through which companies can showcase multiple reasons why they are an employer of choice. “The business is good. Our engagement platform has been used by enterprises as well as startups. We are hoping to break even,” says Shankar.

InterviewStreet is a successful startup story coming out of India in the recruitment space with HackerEarth hot on its heels. Not crowding the space, Huntshire has moved to a new area with a focus on engagement. A relevant angle but it'll be interesting to see how the revenue model evolves for a solution like Huntshire's.