300 recruitment consultants. 55 positions in 30 days. PiQube uses data science and intuition to help hiring

Conversations, coffee, and drinks are possibly where most startup ideas are born. PiQube was no different. Jayadev Mahalingam was having a conversation over drinks with another startup founder, who mentioned that working with recruitment consultants instead of against them produced better results in his experience.

At the time, Jayadev was struggling with his startup idea and business model. The startup was in its first year and the core team had been stuck for seven months without getting paid. “With this new insight, we immediately came up with an ‘Uber for Recruitment Consultants’ backed by our complex machine-learning algorithms and network of human screeners to ensure the quality of profiles landing in the company's inbox,” says Jayadev.

Profiling the candidate

PiQube today, is a people intelligence platform where data science and human judgment overlap to give you intelligence on the talent you have, and the talent you need. It is a hiring tool that not only performs socio-metric profiling and analytical reporting, but also helps create a job, view applicant profiles for that job, shortlist the profiles, reject those that do not qualify, schedule interviews, verify the candidates, and even make an offer to the right candidate.

PiQube has a network of over 300 recruitment consultants and a claimed efficiency level of 1:8, which is atleast twice that of any hiring tool currently available.

Hiring is one of the biggest challenges for modern-day organisations with companies not knowing how to find the right mix of skill, domain expertise, and winning personality in their talent search process.

PiQube aims to remove doubt from the entire process of hiring, through seamless communication, technological intervention, and by never ruling out the efficiency of human judgement.

Also read: Big data startup for talent sourcing, Belong raises USD 5M series A funding

The key differentiators

Jayadev believes that this is an exciting time for the HR Tech space, in India and globally. He says they are solving various pieces of the hiring problem through predictive analytics, Big Data and Cloud; however, the process still remains pretty rudimentary in our country.

According to him, what really sets PiQube apart is the genius overlapping of predictive analytics and human judgement, which has been translated onto a platform. He says it takes you through the entire hiring process, minus all the resume crunching, spreadsheets, paperwork and wasted time.

“We just reached the 25 customer landmark. We've managed to close about 55 positions in the last 30 days across 17 companies.We've onboarded more than 300 recruitment consultants onto the system,” adds Jayadev.

The internal workings

Once the company posts a job on PiQube, it intelligently decides who works on the requirement through a complex scoring system. The system accounts for speed and redundancy, assigning to more when there aren’t enough responses.

Consultants then start working and uploading profiles onto the system; the internal algorithms screen the profiles and score them based on Skill, Domain and Personality. Human screeners like SMEs or work from home HR personnel then eyeball the profiles. If two out of three screeners say approve the profile, it is forwarded to the company.

Interview scheduling is done at the click of a button, and the calendar invites go to both the hiring manager and candidate. The final acceptance is posted on the platform. The invoicing too is automated on the platform.

The team

As a sole founder, Jayadev, who has a background in aircraft wing design and recruitment, says he faced a lot of challenges. But contrary to popular wisdom, not having a co-founder only helped him invest a lot more in his core team.

Rajeshwar Rajaretnam is the Head of Tech at PiQube. He is ex-PayPal and comes with experience in putting together scalable systems and high-end architecture. Jagadis Natarjan, the Product Head is ex-Amazon. Prabha Rajagopalan ensures that Operations run smoothly and has prior experience in seeing a company grow from 10 to 250 people.

Agnelo Mascarenhas and Immanuvel Vasanth are the Analytics backbone of PiQube. They come with very diverse experiences in corporates and startups, and are completely responsible for the Intellectual Capital in the system.

Lakshmi Balasubramanian manages customer relations and was working at eShakti earlier. Ranjani Shankar ensures that the PR machinery is well oiled.

The HR Tech space

The team has raised $500,000 from the "HR Fund" -a group of 50 - 60 HR Heads, who have come together to foster Tech in the HR Community. Currently a Web-only platform, PiQube will be launching Android and iPhone apps soon.

“We already have Singapore-based clients with whom we will be expanding our scope of operations in the coming months. Users can directly apply for jobs through the system from March 2016,” says Jayadev.

According to an HR Service Delivery and Technology Survey, close to 85 per cent of Indian organisations are looking at Cloud for HR. Close to 44 per cent of Indian organisations are looking at mobile for their HR modules. Globally, similar players in the space include iMomentous and Virgin Pulse.

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