Just when recession had hit most entrepreneurs, we thought of getting on board a start-up which we thought would be in the toughest of times. I got a chance to interview on of the co-founders of theHiringTool, Mr. Sumit Punjabi.
The HiringTool connects employers and recruitment agencies throughout the world by accelerating enterprise level planning, management of the recruitment function and everything else to do with recruitment.
Co-founders at theHiringTool.
Here is a transcript of the interview;
Can you briefly introduce us to the team behind The Hiring Tool?
TheHiringTool is co-founded by Nupur Panjabi and Sumit Panjabi. Nupur did her MBA from IIT Roorkee and has worked with BPCL, Wipro, Accenture before launching theHiringTool
Sumit is a serial entrepreneur with starting ventures in motorsports, US Tax consulting and a placement agency. On the professional side, he comes from a computer networking background with MCSE and CCNA certification.
What are the business objectives of The Hiring Tool?
Our objective is to emerge as the market leader in 3rd party recruitment. Similar to the successful job portals, that claim a very deep reach to candidates, we would like to be in a situation that a job posted on our portal has the deepest reach in the consultant community in India.
How are you different from a plethora of similar services/start-ups?
By similar start-ups, I take it that you are talking about referral recruitment sites. If so, then we are not at all similar to them. Our product is designed to provide an employer with new avenues of getting passive candidates and along with that they the benefit of our vendor management system and candidate recruitment lifecycle tracking which is built into the application. THT is not just limited to be used only for candidates that have been submitted through THT but can very effectively be used to manage applicants that come from other sources like internal referrals, job portals etc. We can also help employers to manage their current offline vendors by bringing them under one roof – theHiringTool.
When it comes to hiring, we have big shots like Naukri.com, timesjobs, monster.com, etc. What strategies do you involve to get things rolling with such gigantic competitors in the niche?
Lately, most people feel that these leading job boards have grown to the level of inefficiency. Finding the right candidate is like finding a needle in a haystack. When these job portals were launched, the idea was – pay us an upfront fee for access and job posting and you can search unlimited resumes and thus eliminate the need of engaging 3rd party consultants (which can be quite expensive). Fast forward to today and you’ll see that the placement consultants are still there and a major chunk of recruitment money flows via these third party consultants.
The idea behind THT is to leverage the network of these 20000 placement agencies to help the client get the right candidate in the shortest time frame. Add to that open market competition and an automated rating of placement agents, we are building an environment that is transactional, transparent and competitive. With our model, there are no upfront/subscription fees. An employer only pays once the hire is made
How did the idea of opening a hiring firm kick off? Whose brainchild was it?
TheHiringTool is really an extension of our recruitment firm in the US. Having worked as vendors to various sized organizations, we were able to take those learnings to create a product that solved the pain around recruiting through third party and at the same time open doors to new business opportunities for vendors that are excellent at what they do but don’t get the exposure due to limited marketing budgets.
How was the Hiring Tool bootstrapped?
theHiringTool is presently bootstrapped with our personal savings and a small angel investment from family.
What steps do you take to brand yourselves? Both online and offline.
Currently we depend a lot on word of mouth referral.. In 2009, we’ll be focusing on brand building online and offline via Google adwords and other online advertising programs and offline, we plan on being present at various industry events across the country.
The most important question, how does the Hiring Tool help hire people? Esp. freshers.
As we are an aggregator of third party jobs from across the country, we enable consultants that specialize in various domains (like freshers) get access to employers that are looking to hire from that domain.
Most hiring firms help recruiters hire the applicants/candidates. How did you manage to think of facilitating the small sheeps who are better known as consultants and not the candidates directly? This was something out-of-the-box.
We have a small placement business in the US (we were a sheep) and we felt that because of our size, business development was extremely challenging and we were not able to showcase our ability to different clients. So THT came out of that frustration. There are places where
What are your revenue models and how good have they been for you?
We take 25% of the placement fees and that constitutes for 100% of our revenues currently. However, we’ve identified other revenue sources in various value add services and point solutions that we plan on introducing over the next two quarters.
What’s the biggest surprise you’ve had in the business recently?
Within 30 minutes of posting a job we had over 17 consultants wanting to work on a role that was offering a fee of INR 30k
What are your learning experiences with The Hiring Tool?
Collaboration needs nurturing of relationships and sharing mutual business value, it is difficult to build and sustain but once it acquires momentum it is the most critical barrier to entry for a business like ours
What was the most memorable day for you at The Hiring Tool?
Getting our first 6 figure cheque
What do you have to share with us as a part of your agenda for 2009?
As I mentioned before, you’ll start to see an increase in online visibility for THT. We are always looking for superstars to come join and grow with us so that will continue. And we plan on offering additional VAS and products to further increase the value that we provide to our clients and make the hiring process more streamlined.
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