Dinesh Goel, cofounder and CEO of blue collar job recruitment portal,
Aasaanjobs, sees this trend on the rise. “There has been a definite increase in companies, especially the startups preferring to go out there and approaching candidates they’d want to have in the company. This makes sense because there is far too much talent and far too many CVs flowing into company HR departments, and not enough jobs to be fulfilled.”
Not only are companies not hiring any new candidates at entry or mid level positions, there has been a spate of job slashings reported in the media at companies like Snapdeal and Yepme. When BWDisrupt last spoke to consultants who wished to remain unnamed, we learned that all companies large and small across all industries has put in bound hiring on hold.
The only kind of hiring that is happening then is outbound.
The trend is further evident with VC investors Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Matrix Partners India funding data driven outbound hiring platform,
Belong to the tune of 10 million dollars. This was series B, their series A round was worth 5 million dollars and came from investors like Matrix Partners India, Blume Ventures, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal.
10 million dollars is too much!For anyone hearing that a startup founded in 2014 has raised 10 million dollars after raising a sizable 5 million dollars only around 20 months ago raises the question of whether this is another case of careless investing.
Industry insiders say, “Unless Belong decides to aggressively expand to countries like Singapore and US where there is high demand for experienced, high level talent, 10 million dollars is definitely too much for a recruitment company that is B2B and is not even B2C.”
PTI reports that Belong will be using this money to accelerate product development, sales, support operations, and crucial talent across engineering, data science, enterprise sales and what is referred to as “customer success.”
However Belong has made leaps and bound in gaining the trust of many industry leaders and disruptors like Cisco, Amazon, UHG, Tesco, Reliance Jio and ThoughtWorks, Uber, LendingKart, Xola and Postman.
What companies seem to like the most is that Belong helps with outbound hiring using algorithms.
"In today’s candidate-centric market, I’d say data driven outbound hiring is clearly the most intelligent and scientific way to scale recruiting,” said Savita Hortikar, head of talent acquisition for India at ThoughtWorks, according to PTI.
Belong’s software helps businesses discover and target high-fit talent, engage these candidates through personalized interactions, and accelerate hiring cycles at large scales.
PTI further reports, “the company has doubled its number of mid market and enterprise customers, and has seen a 411 percent year-on-year increase in the number of offers generated via its platforms.”
There are other companies doing the same thing Belong does. PiQube from Chennai raised 500,000 dollars from the HR Fund in early 2015 but reportedly hasn’t made a success out of it so far.
On the hand US based Connectifier is considered to be gaining momentum in the space and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of LinkedIn following the acquisition announced in February 2016.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
