Looking for a new job or an employee? Swipe left or right on Spotle to find the perfect fit
Powered by a mix of NLP, predictive modelling and machine learning, Spotle works as a recommendation-based talent network for millennials. It matches professionals and opportunities contextually, quickly, and accurately.
Jyotirmay Kanthal and Rimjhim Ray lived abroad for almost a decade. The married couple lived in the UK, Switzerland, Finland, Kenya, Germany, and finally returned to India in 2014, to look after their ageing parents.
While setting up a marketing consulting firm and a home care startup (Frapperz; closed last year) in Kolkata, the duo realised how tough finding and training talent was. They began to research the problem and came up against interesting statistics. They found that India has a young workforce - over 64 percent of the workforce comprised millennials. Research also showed that over 71 percent millennials are disengaged at work, 36 percent are likely to hunt for a new job within a year, over 35 percent invest in parallel careers, while 70 percent are inclined to travel.
With millennials set to dominate the workplace, the couple in 2017 decided to found Spotle.ai, a millennial-focused, recommendation-based talent network that matches users with relevant jobs and employers in real time. All you need to do is swipe left or right.
The company created AI-based software, which uses an intuitive swipe mobile interface to find the most relevant opportunities for users. These are in line with their aspirations and potential, allowing better career fits. For companies, Spotle delivers the most relevant candidate matches, saving recruiters time and effort in fitting the right candidates to their demand graph. By switching to a recommendation-based system from a search-based system, Spotle helps recruiters tap the sizeable, passive talent pools.
India has a rich demographic dividend with over 70 percent population aged less than 35 years. This has created a huge pool of employment-ready youngsters.
“This becomes both a source of huge opportunity and risk,” says Jyotirmay Kanthal, Co-founder of Spotle. He adds that finding meaningful employment for the huge talent pool is one of the toughest challenges at a macro level. Spotle believes the market size is large from a potential user base perspective.
The business
Spotle works as a recommendation-based talent network, matching professionals and opportunities contextually, quickly, and accurately - for employers and potential hires.
The Spotle AI understands a user’s moving career graph, and compares his or her profile to a thousand others to plot his potential career map. It then analyses thousands of jobs on the platform and across the internet to find the best-fit opportunities for the user.
“All that the user has to do is seamlessly swipe through relevant hirers and opportunities recommended by the AI, match to the ones he likes, connect on chat, and take the conversation forward,” Jyotirmay says.
For employers, Spotle.ai analyses hiring goals and industry data to calculate demand forecasts. It then finds the most relevant and hireable candidates based on the data.
“The platform disrupts the tedious job search process, making it more dynamic, less bureaucratic, and more accurate,” Jyotirmay says.
The corporate or employer needs to sign up on the Spotle website and give specifications on the type of talent they want. The AI engine trawls the database of talent registered on its platform. Apart from throwing up results, it captures the work executed by the millennial worker and his or her skills.
Spotle.ai is built on an extensive tech stack of AI, ML, and NLP technologies. Powered by over 100,000 codified AI rules, it crunches hundreds of data points to find the perfect candidate-employer match. The data science team is led by Mousum Dutta, an IIT alumnus and an experienced data scientist. The team has developed an extensive library and custom plug-ins on top of core Angular JS to support the swipe-and-match interface.
Rhimjhim, Co-founder of Spotle, says: “We are working on releasing the custom libraries as open source code for more developers to use.”
Spotle operates as a talent network, charging users subscription fees for premium services for employers and potential hires. Companies like IBM and Eureka Forbes are experimenting with Spotle.AI to hire millennial talent.
Growing the network
The founders, who have invested Rs 50 lakh and have also raised undisclosed seed money, say Spotle has reached over 250,000 millennial users and 10,000 employers.
Spotle, now a 10-member team, records an average daily user sign up of 1,000+. At its peak, it has witnessed seven signups every five seconds. The company does not want to disclose its financial performance as it has been in operation for just a year.
According to IBEF, the job search industry is valued at over $5.5 billion in market size. It has some entrenched players, including Naukri, Indeed, Monster, and Shine. But all of these are search-based job listing portals.
“Every startup must have paying customers soon; that’s the only way they can scale up,” says V Ganapathy, CEO of Axilor Ventures.
The challenges notwithstanding, Jyotirmay and Rimjhim believe they can make a dent in the hiring universe.
