Skillate- Solving the Complications of Recruitment Flawlessly

Recruitment is a tough process and it’s not just today but it always has been. Intending to make recruitment Easy, Fast and Transparent, Bipul Vaibhav, Anand Baranwal, and Kumar Sambhav launched Skillate in 2016. The whole idea behind this venture is to shift the focus of recruitment teams “from the ‘how’ to the ‘who’, i.e. process automation to candidate recommendation."

Skilliate HighLights

Skilliate Details

Skillate - About and How it works
Skillate- USP and Innovation
Skillate - Target Market Size
Skillate - Founders and Team
Skillate - How did skilliate start?
Skillate - Startup Launch
Skillate - Business Model and Revenue Model
Skillate - Startup Challenges
Skillate - Funding and Investors
Skillate - Advisors and Mentors
Skillate - Growth
Skillate - Future Plans

Skillate - About and How it works

Skillate is an advanced decision-making engine to make hiring easy, fast, and transparent. The AI-based platform helps in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment, beginning from creating the job requisition, to resume matching, to candidate engagement. Skillate can work as both -

1. A standalone Application Tracking Software (ATS) that takes care of the end-to-end recruitment needs of your organizations, or
2. As an intelligent system that integrates with your existing ATS to make your recruitment easy, fast, and transparent.

Skillate solutions are solving the following problems:

• Candidate sourcing: Skillate’s new-age sourcing methodology continuously expands your central database through a connected network of resources: job boards, emails, ATS, consultancies, referrals, career pages, etc. Skillate solutions help you utilize your central database better.
• Candidate screening: Skillate Chatbot and AI-powered matching, thinks like a recruiter and provides AI-backed scores for candidates based on education, experience, and skill levels. The intelligent platform provides ‘much beyond a keyword match’, and understands patterns and context to ensure that you never miss out on a quality candidate.
• Candidate experience: The Conversational AI of our chatbot automates communication and creates personalized candidate experiences at scale. It captures information beyond resumes (for ex.- shift and relocation readiness) and keeps the information repository fresh. Our JD assistant, on the other hand, gives real-time feedback to recruiters on their JD and helps them in writing detailed job descriptions to attract the best candidates.

Also Read: Top 6 Ways ChatBot For Business Can Help You

Skillate- USP and Innovation

Skillate has trained its system with over 20 million diverse profiles and has 15+ paying clients. Working with it, the clients have achieved the following benefits:

• Reducing hiring time by 65%
• Cost per hire by more than 30%
• 40% Lesser Interviews
• 2.2x conversions

Some other prominent USP’s are:

• The AI-based solutions are ‘self-learning’ and provide improved results over time
• Skillate is secured and is working with some of the biggest enterprises across sectors
• Skillate integrates with existing ATSs like Success Factor and Taleo to help organizations with a smooth transition
• Skillate works efficiently at scale. The platform processes 5 Lakh resumes screening in 4 seconds
• Skillate is the official partner of SAP

Skillate - Target Market Size

The Recruitment Industry in India is growing at 21% per year and is approximately worth Rs. 35,000 crores as per Executive Recruiters Association and Ernst & Young. The global recruitment software market size was valued at US$ 1,753.2 Mn in 2017 and is projected to reach US$ 3,095.8 Mn by the end of 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 7.4%, according to Fortune Business Insights.

The technology landscape is dynamic. Currently, traditional products like Workday, SuccessFactors, etc. are used by enterprises. Even though these solutions promise end-to-end management of the recruiting process, there are gaping holes that need to be filled. Solutions that use cutting edge technology along with the power of AI to integrate with these existing platforms can solve some real pain points of the industry. New players like Skillate, Talview, HackerEarth, Leena AI, KPISoft, Xoxoday, etc. are centering themselves around a mother platform to make the entire recruitment experience seamless.

“People Analytics” and “Offer to Joining Ratio” are two new problems of this decade. Diversity and Inclusion is one of the core agendas for all the large enterprises today, and it is a global mandate to implement this at scale. The industry has started talking about the Quality of Hire and Reduced TAT by leveraging technology. The world is expecting to see some great innovation happening in these areas. So, in general, there are exciting times ahead. In the next 5 years, the industry will talk about analytics in the HR function by leveraging tools like Tableau or Power BI the way we do it in Sales, Marketing, or Operations.

Skillate - Founders and Team

The founders Skillate are Bipul Vaibhav, Anand Baranwal, and Kumar Sambhav. Sambhav and Bipul are friends from their college days. Sambahv was more into technology, and Bipul always had a great sense of business. When they decided to start their venture, Anand, who was living with them as their flatmate, decided to join in. Anand was working in Tracxn then as an analyst and had developed a deep understanding of the startup ecosystem during his research.

Bipul Vaibhav, Co-founder, and CEO, Skillate- At Skillate, Bipul is responsible for AI, Investment, and overall business growth of Skillate. Before founding Skillate, Bipul worked as a Data Scientist at DataWeave Software Pvt Ltd, where he developed a machine learning model to classify the product categories of e-commerce products. He also worked as an advanced software engineer with Burning Glass Technologies for a little less than a year. Bipul holds a B. Tech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati. He has co-authored a paper on an autonomous river cleaning robot and a model for video classification using semantic keywords. He holds research publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence at International Forums like SPIE and IEEE. Bipul is passionate about Cricket, Reading books, and Building software products.

Anand Baranwal, Co-founder, Skillate - As one of the co-founders of Skillate, Anand’s primary role/responsibility is to drive business and growth at Skillate. He is responsible for Business Development, Marketing, and Hiring the right talent for his company. Before co-founding Skillate, Anand has had extensive experience as an analyst with Tracxn where he engaged with the FinTech industry in the Southeast Asia region. He has also managed projects for JSW Steel Ltd. Anand graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Production and Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Anand’s specialization skills lie in the areas of Business Development and Operations activities. Anand’s passion is to find and meet like-minded people to learn and grow in all aspects of life.

Kumar Sambhav, Co-founder, Skillate - Sambhav is the Co-founder at Skillate and he is responsible for strategy, roadmap, and feature definition of the product to deliver unique value to our clients. Before Skillate, Kumar was involved in software development at Capillary Technologies. He was working in the product that handles the campaign management and subscription management for the client. Sambhav holds a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati. He specializes in software design and system architecture which varies from the backend to the front part of the application. He is passionate about music and plays guitar in his spare time. He has a sports bug and plays Tennis and Table Tennis.

Currently, the Skillate team is made up of 25+ dynamic individuals with expertise in different domains. Skillate management is flexible with working hours and doesn’t believe in micromanagement. There is just one criterion to join the Skillate team- behave like an entrepreneur while respecting the team dynamics.

Also Read: How to Hire CTO for Your Startup

Skillate - How did it start?

In January 2015, Bipul was working for an analytics software company in Chennai. Unhappy with his role, Bipul contacted various organizations with openings, but to no avail. The frustrating part was not that he was getting rejected, but that often, he would simply not receive any response from the recruiters. He had no clarity on what stage his applications were getting rejected, or even if they were noticed at all!

This got Bipul thinking about the lack of transparency prevalent in the recruitment process. He realized that even though candidates desperately want a response from the company on the stature of their candidature, large corporations often don’t have the time and bandwidth to respond to every candidate at each stage of the hiring process. With corporate firms receiving millions of applications every year, the unstructured hiring process not only keeps the candidates in the dark but also deprives organizations of the best talents.

This led Bipul with his co-founders - Sambhav and Anand to form Skillate, an AI-based platform that makes recruitment Easy, Fast, and Transparent with its cutting edge technology.

Skillate - Startup Launch

In the beginning, when the co-founders had only tested the platform on LinkedIn profiles, they connected to an HR manager through a mutual connection and collected about 1600 resumes. “We tested our algorithms on these resumes and failed miserably! We were shocked. It was one of the days when we doubted if we should go ahead with our product or not.” Says Bipul Vaibhav.

However, rather than giving up, the team went back to the drawing board and revisited the basics of the technology they had created. They understood that to truly make AI work in a complex industry like recruitment, they will need to consider the human element of resume making.

For example, they can’t just feed the machine with names and expect that it will understand the context. Let’s say a candidate has written his address as “next to Lakshmi road”. The machine needs to understand that here ‘Lakshmi’ is the name of the street and not a person as it normally would be.

Similarly, as they tested more and more resumes, they understood some of the different patterns of resumes. Simple elements, like mail id and contact information, are placed at different places by different candidates. And then they trained the algorithms to identify elements like that.

After this, the first person they spoke to was Tanuj Choudhry from HomeLane and Anuj Agarwal from zyoin. They had a deep understanding of the recruitment industry and came from a rich technical background. Then the founders started with finalizing a set of target organizations and sent highly personalized emails to the decision-makers so that they can trust the product as well as them. In the early stage, founders must make themselves as credible as they want their product to be. Apart from the personalized emails, in-depth market research helped them in understanding the pain points of our customers. Word of mouth and reference from existing clients also played a crucial role in acquiring new clients since they were highly satisfied with the product.

Skillate - Business Model and Revenue Model

Skillate charges on a yearly subscription model, depending on the size of the company.

Skillate - Startup Challenges

Recruitment as an industry still plays by the old rules. Convincing the team that heads technology can make their work easier and more efficient was a challenge. Even after Skillate’s solutions convinced them, adoption in the company remained an issue. Also, it’s dashboard’s highly intuitive design, along with our committed customer success team, ensured that adopting the Skillate platform was a smooth process with little training to the recruitment team.

Skillate - Funding and Investors

In October 2019, Skillate raised its pre-Series A funding of $1 Million from investors like Mynavi Corporation, Incubate Fund, and Whatfix Founders, among others.

Also Read: Top Funded Startups India

Skillate - Advisors and Mentors

The advisors and mentors of Skillate are:

• Shraddhanjali Rao - Head HR - SAP, India, Partner to the business
• Abhijit Bhaduri - ex-Chief learning Officer - Wipro.

Skillate - Growth

Skillate is working with some of the biggest enterprises of the country, including the likes of Yes Bank, OYO, Saint-Gobain, L&T Financial Services, Software AG, RBL Bank, Liberty Insurance, Bigbasket, etc.

Skillate - Future Plans

"International expansion is one of our key focus areas, especially in the US. As we expand, we are making our product multi-lingual and more scalable so that it can handle even more volume.” Concluded Bipul Vaibhav.