AmbitionBox gives students an insight into interview processes; helps them chose a career

When it comes to Tier-1 colleges, most people graduate with more than an offer in hand. While the placement and training centers of most colleges place a limit on the number of companies a candidate can opt for, this puts a huge burden in the form of decision making on candidates who do not have a clear choice. AmbitionBox - a startup from IIT Madras helps you through this dilemma.

AmbitionBox was started by Mayur Mundada and Subramanya Jingade, who were friends at IIT Madras. After graduating, Mayur worked at JP Morgan before he started AmbitionBox. The fact that Mayur had a business background, helped him a lot. He says his father was extremely happy when he got to know that his son had resigned to start up instead of taking up a career in investment banking. Subramanya is a final year MTech student at IIT Madras. He is a multitalented person who has worked in projects ranging from robotics, automobile engineering, electronics and programming to music. He is also a freelance web developer and has worked on a number of projects for IIT Madras alumni during his graduation. Subramanya handles technology at AmbitionBox while Mayur manages operations.

There are a lot of websites which give an objective view of the pay scale, company hierarchy management structure and products companies are building and pretty much all the tangible data which can be quantified. However, more important than that are things like the interview process, peer review and advice about it. And this is where AmbitionBox comes into the picture. Mayur says, "A major issue we faced during our placements in college was in reaching out to seniors for knowing their interview experiences and to get advice on preparing for placements. With very few connections with seniors and limited time we realized it’s very inefficient to reach out to them personally. We thought we could build a highly scalable solution for this and thus started AmbitionBox.com."

The main focus of the company is on improving the UI/UX of the website to increase footfalls and get more students to use it. The website brings together people who have been placed in different companies and students who are looking to get placed. People who have already been placed talk about their interview experiences and tips. Since their launch two months back, AmbitionBox has garnered over 1000 reviews from 250 companies.

Their ride wasn't very smooth. Mayur says, "One major roadblock was building the team. One mistake I made was to outsource the web development part to an agency in the initial days. Lesson learnt was that they wouldn't build with the passion you have..You cannot outsource the core offering of your startup if you are building a tech startup.

There were a few moments at the start that almost made me give up in frustration. I think every entrepreneur goes through that phase. I took lot of mentorship and advice during that phase from friends and seniors. As an entrepreneur you need a thick skin and be a little "couldn’t care less" about what others say sometimes."

At present, the team is planning to come out with more products to build revenue and get a foot into the recruitment and hiring space. In the last decade a lot of startups have entered this space ranging from technical hiring to age-old recruitment. However, no company has forayed in the space of reviews which makes it an interesting startup to watch out for.

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