Youth4work raises $500000, launches college solutions with more than 500,000 youth on platform

Youth4work, a next generation people search platform that offers ‘pre-assessed’ talent communities for companies to engage and contact, has raised $500,000 bridge capital from a group of investors including angel investors Sanjay Bansal, Dan Sandhu, Aurum Equity Partners LLP and GAP investments.

Founded by Rachit Jain, Youth4Work is a platform where individuals showcase their talent & skills, and are then tested and scored vis-à-vis thousands of others. These pre-assessed profiles are then made available to companies for engaging and communicating about their brand or hiring more efficiently and quickly. The platform also helps companies engage people with specific skill sets for specific activities. E.g. a large IT company engaged with people with interest in designing, get their feedback on their product.

Rachit says,

The value proposition is about engaging and interacting with the ‘right’ few people when hiring or engaging for any activity. At Youth4work, we are building data intelligence on People. What sets Youth4work apart from other platforms is the Data Science behind every youth registered with us.

The platform assess people by way of online multiple-choice questions that gauge a person’s proficiency in particular skills. A unique yRank is assigned to each talent based on a ranking algorithm considering the person’s performance in the yTest, contributions in talent discussion forums, profile completeness, social vouches, what they view, show interest on etc. The platform currently hosts 400+ talent assessment tests and many more practice tests. Each talent has its own community, which can be reached out for any targeted communications.

Dan Sandhu adds,

The investors were impressed with the execution capability of the team. In less than 2 years into its beta launch, Youth4work has got around 500,000 registered youth who have been tested and profiled and thousands of companies who are actively using it to engage the right talent. The assessment technology built by Youth4work is the USP, the adaptive and intelligence is unique and highly scalable.

The company currently have clients like Microsoft, Adobe, Mahindra, Aon Hewitt and many others who engage with the intuitive platform. The Company is actively working on scaling up its tried and tested products and strengthening its reach of users by engaging early, They plan to reach and help 2 million users in India alone by 2015.

College solutions: An innovative cost-effective way of developing students’ employability

As per UGC, there are about 700 universities and 35000+ affiliated colleges in India which enrol more than 22 million students every year and much of this growth in education space has happened over last 5-7 years. Whereas, the number of jobs in the corporate have failed to keep pace. A majority of students fail to see the light of their dream corporate world, mostly because they don’t get avenues to showcase and sell their talents.

Rachit says,

We have more than 500000 youth on our platform, from more than 5900 colleges. About 20% of them are still students wanting to showcase their talents to the world. After discussions with few engineering and management colleges, we found that every college management wishes to see their students getting placed in good companies but are unable to excite students to prepare right from the start. We created an integrated solution that can help the college management as well as the students to know their strength areas by getting assessed periodically. College management can gauge performance year-wise, branch-wise and also for each student and create training and development programs as required to build employability skills. Interestingly, colleges can implement this solution right from 1^st year of education. The control is with college management, with an aid from Youth4work team, to run the assessments.

Youth4work’s technology enables the college to assess students multiple times in a year with increasing difficulty and chart out one’s performance of progress as well as comparison with other students. Types of assessments that a college can perform:

1. Performance Tests series – aimed at assessing student’s employability skills
2. Core Domain Tests – aimed at evaluating students’ core domain knowledge
3. Psychometric Test – aimed at making the student and college aware about behavioural patterns
4. Class Tests – aimed at empowering professors to create their own tests for subjects they teach

The reports generated – including comparative analytics, overall percentile and percentage of tests, speed and accuracy, etc. guide the students and management to make better decisions of improvement. Other benefits for college management includes:

• Online profiling: With students creating their online profiles, the college’s profile is automatically generated. This can be used to showcase to potential campus recruiters as well as future students.
• College Talent Matrix: Knowing the talents of their students and compare with students of other colleges and experienced professionals as well
• Social Learning: Bringing students, alumni and professors on a common platform to interact and discuss topics, share learning materials, update news and events about the college, etc.

Rachit and his team want to bring out the talent hidden in small colleges as well and give them a platform to meet corporates. This doesn’t happen in final year alone and it’s a gradual process. According to Rachit, this is a long term solution for the colleges rather than short-term placement focussed programs and as a testimony, 14 colleges have signed up for this solution already.