GradLimited is a mentorship platform for students and young graduates, helping them explore relevant career and education avenues on the basis of their scientifically assessed personality. The start-up has been founded on the insight that most students lack appropriate mentorship at critical junctures in their career leading to arbitrary decision making with regards to education and career avenues. As a matter of fact, over 25% of students leave their first job within 6 months of their hiring, due to a lack of job fitment. GradLimited provides students and fresh graduates with a platform that helps them get insights into their inherent personality and explore most relevant avenues in alignment to it. Using the existing technology, the efforts are being directed towards ensuring that every student in the country can have access to most relevant opportunities for academic and career progression at the right age.
While most developed countries are very well versed with the concept of personality assessment for job search, Personality based career exploration being a relatively new concept in the Indian ecosystem and that posed a challenge for the start-up. But the founders of the platform believe that this is definitely changing and the big MNCs are seen investing highly in this proposition as early adopters. The primary efforts currently is being made with regards to educating the audience about the benefits of ‘personality based’ career exploration. Keeping in mind that most of the student population spends majority of their time on social media, the GradLimited team has been working towards using social media to educate their audiences and establish thought leadership.
Currently, GradLimited is the only holistic mentorship and career development platform in the country and also the only platform that provides students with a digital footprint report that helps highlight career inclinations based on social media activity.
The core team behind this ambitious start-up consists of 3 people, having backgrounds in education, assessments, talent development and entrepreneurship. Abhishek Mehta and Avinash Rogye who head Marketing and Operations respectively have worked on multiple projects together in the past. Completing the trio is serial Entrepreneur Gaurav Assomull. The project has been incubated by Young Ideas Ventures.
Most of the initial team members came from a mixed background of assessment and talent development. Having worked with students and fresh graduates the team realised the flaws in the conventional decision making process. Corporates on the other hand used personality assessment to ensure fitment and alignment to work. So the Eureka moment for the team was to infuse this ‘culture’ of assessment driven decision making to an individual level, wherein students could themselves use these tests in a DIY format to aid them with exploration of avenues at the right age.
GradLimited is free for students. The revenue model is primarily based on employers who wish to use the platform as a recruitment engine and course providers looking at targeted promotion of their courses. Having been live since Jan 2017, over 4000 students are currently using the platform to explore a host of avenues. They also have thousands of jobs, internships and courses listed on the platform from multiple companies and institutes to source the right talent. The platform also provides students with access to scholarships worth over 2500 crore.
On the revenue front, Corporates using GradLimited to source entry level talent are charged on a subscription basis. The company value adds to the corporate clients, by providing preliminary assessment and digital footprint reports of all applicants to ensure that the time, cost and effort to hire is reduced. Since the profiles are filtered based on personality fitment, companies save cost by eliminating additional assessments while simultaneously save time by only going through the most relevant profiles. Institutes use gradlimited.com to list their courses and source effective leads.The idea is to reinvent the way conventional campus recruitment drives are conducted which is both a time and cost burden to companies.
Once a student logs in to the platform, he/she is put through a battery of assessments. Upon taking the assessments, downloadable reports are generated for students. These reports are both psychometric as well as behavioural in nature. GradLimited is the only company in India that is able to assess a candidate’s personality on the basis of their social media activity. The team believes that a digital footprint report is the best form of validation to a candidate’s psychometric information as it is based on their actual behaviour over a prolonged period of time. Then the matchmaking engine uses this data to recommend most suitable jobs, courses, internships and scholarships on the basis of this information. The student can browse and apply to personality relevant jobs, courses and internships on the platform, while the employer can use the same personality details for each applicant from an employer side dashboard to make an informed hiring decision.
GradLimited works with a vision to ‘Create future leaders and operationally is aiming to increase their presence from a primarily Mumbai based company to Pan India operations over the next few months.
