How Gurgaon-based HRTech startup Uncap created a career page solution that offers real time role advisory for candidates

Technology has had a tremendous, almost unimaginable impact on our lives. Whether it's shopping, healthcare, fitness, banking or robotics, each touchpoint has become an industry and has grown by leaps and bounds.

The sheer growth wouldn't have been possible without one key aspect which is "people" - ideating and building great experiences for end customers. As "people" lay the foundation of an organisation, Talent Management — the function responsible for engaging, assessing, onboarding and growing talent — has also evolved with technology.

Despite many forward-looking solutions, 6 out of 10 organisations do not have a well-configured career page. If they do, they don't have the budget to manage the engineering spend around hosting, content and other integrations with applicant sources. Although they have fair to good applicant traffic coming from different sources, dissatisfaction is still high for both the applicant and the hiring manager/recruiter.

Recognising this problem, Gaurav Gaur and Naveen Chaudhary founded Uncap Research Labs in 2018, an HRtech startup with a mission to build compelling recruiting stories. Before building Uncap, the founders worked with organisations like Expedia, MakeMyTrip and Microsoft to build India's growth story around talent for product as an ecosystem.

The beginning

While working with CXOs to create robust programmes around talent and culture, Gaurav recalls how he came across an applicant and was moved by what he had shared with him.

The applicant, a Product Manager with a leading internet product organisation said,

"Organisations today spend a lot on building a talent pipeline by investing in social media, engaging consultants, job boards, positive communication, referrals etc., and I get a lot of calls too, but recruiting organisations never get back to me with my application feedback. Instead, I get a stereotyped email from the applicant tracking system claiming you are in process, or we will get back to you. I just wish someone could tell me why I couldn't make it or the other way round. At times it is so demeaning, and I wonder if there is someone who even looks at my resume or does it flow into a big black hole."

Gaurav engaged with over 60 such candidates and leveraged Twitter to validate these concerns. He discovered that 80 percent of candidates faced similar problems, and 8 of 10 tweets on "interview feedback" were from people still waiting to hear back from recruiters or hiring managers. On the other hand, hiring managers were under tremendous pressure to attract, assess and onboard the right talent.

Despite the HRtech budget of $200K, the probability of an offer to a candidate stood at 2 percent of the total applications. COVID times, impacted another leading metric of offer decline, with probability of a candidate joining at about 30%.

The time to identify was also higher to 45+ days with recruiters investing 6+ hours a day clearing workflows of application management rather than managing stakeholders or partnering for futuristic opportunities. Overall, high dissatisfaction prevails amongst job applicants and a tremendous load on hiring managers/recruiters.

In 2018, Gaurav and his team started working on a technology guided by this insight. His vision was to create a solution so that the applicant will know the feedback in real-time.

This was the beginning of Uncap's journey and the birth of their innovative tech solution, linkzy.io.

What is Linkzy.io ?

Carefully balancing the needs of job seekers and recruiters, Linkzy.io brings a no-code career page solution that can be integrated with any organisation's website. It can be customised to suit each organisation's needs. Linkzy.io delivers derived feedback and job advisory to applicant traffic in real-time, which the hiring manager can calibrate as per their needs.

Linkzy.io is integrated with AI-powered navigation, where an algorithm derives the earning potential of applicants and recommends jobs that are best suited for them. Moreover, with real-time feedback advisory, applicants can leverage Linkzy's interviewer network better to understand the specifics of their fitment for any job.

Business and growth

Speaking about milestones at Uncap, Naveen says, "Uncap today has two broad business portfolios, i.e. linkzy.io, our engineering playground providing a no-code, career page automation platform and Deciphy, where we work as talent advisors with product engineering organisations to strengthen talent as a landscape for them."

"Once envisioned from a car bunk, we are now a growing team of 10 members, 15 clients, piloting the platform with 1,200+ product engineering applicants with a 70 percent repeat rate, and over 100+ product engineering jobs live on the platform. Not just that, since 2018, we have engaged over 4,000 product engineering professionals and have helped over 300 professionals get a seat in reputed product organisations in Bengaluru, Gurugram, Chennai and Hyderabad," he shares.

Naveen and Gaurav built the startup to create positive recruitment stories. And for a bootstrapped venture to achieve such growth, founders credit the solid cultural value system of the organisation.

Gaurav says, "We strongly believe in customer-centric approach and high delivery standards. Our core values include building your own story, integrity and trust, which we think are the DNA for a young and lean organisation like ours solving an experiential problem."

Uncap is on a mission to empower recruiters and encourage them to use a no-code platform linkzy.io to create and manage an online career page. "We want to cut through the investment on ATS (Applicant Tracking System), Job cast and leverage the power of API to manage the complete integration in a few clicks. The boulder for the next six months is people, adoption and strengthening engineering," shares Gaurav.

Called out for innovative HRTech by PeopleMatters startup enclave early this year, Uncap was recently shortlisted for the October '21 cohort by New Chip Accelerator based out of Dallas. The founders are looking forward to joining the programme with the clear objective of gaining more adoption for the product and expanding to more use cases in the talent acquisition industry.