Towards the end of every year, entrepreneur Ketan Dewan makes it a point to take a break from work and spend time with himself. In 2014, when on one such hiatus, he realised that it was time to pursue his dream of creating a healthy hiring ecosystem that provides space for anyone willing to work.
So, on March 2015 he left the HR firm he was with and started Talocity Instasolutions Pvt Ltd — an app-based video interview platform powered by video analytics and artificial intelligence (VA-AI). During this transition period, he met his friend from school, Dilpreet Singh, who helped shape his idea, and Rajat Suneja, who built the product, and the three have come a long way since.
View-and-hire model
Explaining how Talocity works to combine different recruitment services on one platform, he says, “My co-founders and I collated over 40 years of experience in the HR, recruitment and technology development fields to understand the nuances of the domains. Talocity has the strength to support automation of the entire recruitment process for any organisation. We are a vertical SaaS (software as a service)-based platform and can be integrated with all proprietary technologies.”
Talocity eases the hiring process for recruiters and applicants, acting as the most efficient HR team. He adds, “In the HR services space, there are various companies that offer sourcing of CVs, assessments and video CVs, and video/audio interviewing solutions, but there is no single player that offers all the services to its clients on an integrated technological platform.”
This results in organisations either engaging different vendors for various services or having a few vendors who may tie-up internally with other players for distinct services as required by their clients. “They charge a margin over the payment, which results in the client paying more without any assurance on quality. This, therefore, increases their cost per hire. Even Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) companies, at best, deliver robust processes that run on SLAs (service-level agreements). However, the market requires intelligently assessed candidates who enable the concept of view-and-hire rather than interview-and-hire.”
Understanding the process
In essence, job-seekers upload a two-minute, one-way video that acts as their CV. They also decide which companies they want to be interviewed by. And employers must upload a video that contains the job description and a view of the campus/work space. The message-bots take over the responsibility of scheduling further interviews. An otherwise tedious hiring process is automated so that every step is completed through the app, which is available on Google Play Store. While signing up is free for the job-seekers, hiring companies pay a variable fee to the website.
Talocity caters to various client needs, including employers who hire in large numbers. For such companies and SMEs, there is a customised vertical SaaS-based integrated engine that matches video interviews with video job-description and schedules face-to-face interviews. It also generates a 48-attribute personality report from video inputs for employers and applicants.
VA-AI combination
This unique deployment of video analytics and artificial intelligence replicates a real one-on-one meeting between a job-seeker and an employer, and supports the short-listing of one-way video interviews and one-way video job-descriptions. “It enables companies to hire without biases.”
According to Ketan it won’t be long before the entire recruitment process is conducted virtually, and the first time an applicant enters an office is as an employee of that company!
Funding
Having worked with different companies before, 39-year-old Ketan is no newcomer to the entrepreneurial or business world. The MBA (Finance and Strategy) graduate from City University, Cass Business School, London, says that it’s no joke to start a venture.
Ask him about Talocity’s funding, and he says, “Our initial investment came from our own pockets, investors and borrowings. Around ₹95 lakh came from nine angel investors. After that we received over ₹2 crore from a corporate (so it’s semi-institutional funding).” Now, they are looking to grow inorganically as they have identified certain unique product features that other players may replicate quickly, though Talocity's investors still retain the lead time advantage. So, it won’t be long before news of acquisition is announced.