European Female Entrepreneurs Exporting Indian IT Talent

Are you treated differently as entrepreneurs who are women and in services for IT?

Being a woman entrepreneur and in the IT services industry in India has its pros and cons. However, I personally feel that the benefits to it far out weight the disadvantages. Since most decision makers in our field are men I think we as women are able to build client relationships which are deeper and long lasting.

Often a conversation with a prospective client touches not only the business but also the personal aspects of the family and kids, which obviously connects people faster and creates deeper rapport.

The only time I have felt difference in the approach is when looking for funding. It seems that the combination woman, IT services industry, non tech founder, with non tech tier 1 education and no network in India is not a very attractive prospect for funders. However, we are working very hard on changing that and proving that a great idea can become successful.

How do you feel about feminists? Women empowerment? And women liberation?

Honestly I don’t have much of an opinion about this topic. Women in Europe as well as in India occupy top level positions. In Europe being a woman in a leadership position means lots of personal sacrifices, sometimes even resulting in being left with no family or kids to speak of. In India the challenge is to be an extremely strong personality, have the support of your entire family while balance your social expectations as a woman with your work obligations.

How did you two get started with your startup IT World Web.com?

ITWW was conceived back in the Netherlands by me and my younger sister Slavina. Inspired by success of Linkedin, we started ITWW as a professional network specialized for the IT professionals globally. We had heard a lot about the "talent gap" and that European companies were facing a challenge in hiring tech talent.

Our research showed us that India is the country with the highest number of engineers graduating every year, about half a million new engineers added to the 6 million tech pool in India. Hence we chose to believe that India’s engineers might be the answer to the shortage that Europe is facing.

You say it was quite tough settling in India. How tough?

For us being women entrepreneurs and me being a mother, at that time of a 3 year old, coming to India to do business was a jump in deep waters. We didn’t understand the market, didn’t have a clue about the culture, let alone know anything about doing business here.

Thanks to a special person who later became our director for India, I landed in Delhi in the summer of 2014. Together we had endless brainstorm sessions on how to penetrate this exciting, full of opportunities but extremely challenging market. It felt like David vs Goliath.

But something drove you to set up this business against all odds?

Consider the following fact: In Europe (22 countries) at any given point in time we have 1 million IT jobs that remain unfulfilled. Also the European Commissioner Neelie Kroes has been talking about European tech and innovation under threat as we are not producing engineers fast enough and innovation in technology is going way too fast for European business to cope with it. On the other hand, by 2020, India’s IT talent pool is expected to exceed 8 million IT professionals and become the 2nd largest after the USA.

Plus, the quality of the Indian IT professionals has increased to such heights that even large MNCs like Sears Holding, Target.com and Tesco have shifted their extremely complex big data and analytics work to India.

So Indian IT pros are the perfect answer to the job gap in Europe.

Tell us about the company

We started in 2011, but the official launch of the business was in January 2014. We are a global marketplace for IT hiring and projects outsourcing.

We aggregate clients (mainly funded startups and small and medium businesses) and we aggregate vendor partners (agencies and development companies). Through us clients hire tech resources much faster as we tap into the networks and CV databases of hundreds of agencies and deliver candidates which are 80-100% relevant.

Why the decision to service IT companies?

The decision is to service any type of company that is hiring tech or in need of a technology partners, not just IT companies. As I already mentioned technology is moving very fast and for companies to stay abreast of the competition they need very skilled tech people. And the demand for this skilled IT people is very high.

Since our coming to India we have been able to serve over 60-70 Clients within our selected target group. The market size for IT hiring in Europe is 30 billion dollar, in India it's about 500 million dollars but growing rapidly at more than 15 per cent per annum. Estimated size of the European outsourcing market in our target group segment is close to 100 billion dollars.

How did you finance the idea? Is it cost intensive?

We are a funded company and had our round done by Hilliant Investments. The model that we operate is surely cost effective. Currently and going forward we aim at utilizing technology to do most of the work. We do not believe in hiring people in India because it is cost effective. We rather believe in hiring few great folks, optimize the processes and make sure the human factor, which can result in inefficiencies is limited to a minimum.

Who are some of your notable clients or sectors served in the 10 countries?

Some of our clients are Yepme.com, Xseed Education, Staples India and Global Logic.

How did you manage to expand to 10 countries?

This is not that much of expansion as it is based on a network of local recruitment agencies, development partners in these various countries supporting us in hiring for our clients.

Future plans for the company?

Going forward we plan to strengthen our sales and tech teams so that we can focus on the scalability of the model and add new clients. In addition to that we would love to have large Indian recruitment agencies as part of our partner network recruiting for Europe.

Is the world talking too much about equality for women in white collar jobs? Should it be more about women who are less privileged?

My opinion here is also quite limited. However, as part of our dream, one day we would like to support female kids in remote areas and groom them into women who take charge of their lives and careers. We hope that with that approach we can definitely contribute to the changing the way underprivileged women grow in their career.