Youth4work is a Skill Assessment Platform that went live on Feb 2012 helping the Youth assess and improve their talents. It is a Youth centric platform where assessment is a tool that helps identify the talent that each individual pursues & how good or bad they are amongst the others who have a similar talent.
There are basically 3 aspects on the company’s product:
Prepare/Assess yourself > Improve yourself > Showcase your self· Prepare / assess – Here they actually help the youth to prepare for exams & assess their own skills
· Improve – here based on their skills, rank and pursuit the company suggests the right online course to people
· Showcase – The Tested and Ranked profiles are showcased. They can be searched by anyone
Apart from skill tests which are free for all. The firm monetizes on freemium models on Prep, Online courses & connecting youth to companies.
Sujata Sangwan interacts with Rachit Jain, Founder & CEO, Youth4work and spoke to him
How much funding you raised till now?We aren’t just interested in monetary gains, but finding the right investors who share our vision and like to grow the unique space we have created. We have made a great impact on the industry. There is a vibrant market of 300 Million users out there. Out of these users, we have 1.3 million ranked profiles.
What is your monetization model?We have revenue streams on both side of the talent value chain - demand and supply. On the demand side, for the companies and recruiters, we offer talent solutions, customer assessment solutions etc. On the supply side, for the youth, we offer online prep tests, online talent certification courses, amongst others.
What are your future plans?We feel the opportunity and the need is bigger than only jobs. The need is to build people intelligence, which personalises information and guides people to connect and collaborate. That is important as about 300 million people will enter India’s workforce in next few years. We would like to be the de facto platform where every youth, who is connected to the Internet, comes on board with us to improve oneself and become part of a talent community.
How do you look at expansion?About 98% of 1.3 Million users on our platform are from nearly 2000 different locations across India, the rest being International users, who have signed up themselves just to self-assess their talents (without any marketing!). Hence, expanding geographically will never be a constraint for us, our technology is smooth. Product wise, we will continue to strengthen our core, i.e. assessment based cost-effective talent solutions for the entire talent value chain.
Challenges faced till now?The term startup sounds very fancy and pulls in lot of attraction from those around. If one has a killing instinct to so something for the society at large, has clear vision, persistence, passion, and belief in oneself, it's sure to reap benefits in the long run. Hiring for my first two ventures was obviously a big challenge which led me to start youth4work. Even bigger challenge is making the team work with passion. If you are able to rope in the right talent and able to keep their interests intact, there is obviously no stoppage. The magic happens only when you fill in the right places with the exact people and give them sufficient reasons to perform.
Market size and opportunity?The primary focus is to prepare and aid Youth in their career journey, i.e. right from start of graduation till 5 years of experience. In India, approx. 20 Mn people take up higher education (Graduation, Bachelors) every year in various streams and aspire to be a talented professional. Also, there is a great demand for workforce with certified vocational skills; Govt. of India plans to skill and certify about 400 Mn people by 2022. These scenarios create a huge potential target audience, at least 200 Mn, whom Youth4work can impact positively by empowering them to self-assess, improve and showcase their talents.
Being a part of online skill/ talent assessment business, how do you think Youth4work is different?The whole intent of creating Youth4work was to break the clutter of similar functioning job-boards, and there was not much innovation in this space. We wanted to create an integrated platform that is open for both sides of talent value chain - demand and supply, and we have done it. Youth4work’s core is open and large pool of talent communities created by people’s intelligent profiling via assessments, which can be harnessed for any potential opportunities. Jobs is one of the opportunities, others being professional community interactions and skill development courses. It provides a whole gamut of choices to self-assess, learn, improve one’s skills and attract attention of many recruiters who are active on the platform.
Do you only offer online assessment or offer services like English tutorials?We know that mere assessing of talents will not benefit the youth. Hence, yes, based on one’s performance in talent assessments and otherwise too, we offer online certification courses for improving their talents. We have wide range of 1500+ online courses across all domains, including Languages, IT, Finance, Business Management, Sales & Marketing, Human Resources, etc.
How are these assessment tests beneficial for job?Employers want a standard format of profiles and they want to have some kind of metric/assessment of the real talents and interests of job seekers. That is exactly what we do at Youth4work, Any employer could find ‘pre-assessed job seekers’ tested and ranked on their skills via ‘talent boards’ , they can easily find the profiles of people with the skills that their job requires and contact the top few for their job.
Can you elaborate on the online Prep Tests offered?Youth4Work Prep Tests are ingeniously designed online mock tests and practice tests that help aspirants excel in the competitive examinations. These are user-modifiable mock tests —i.e. the aspirant can modify the number of questions in each section in the test. This allows the aspirant to focus on weak areas by practicing more number of questions. Furthermore, aspirants also get insightful self-performance report at the end of each test session on— time, speed, accuracy details w.r.t. competition (other test-takers).
We offer prep tests for varied exam categories. Some of them are listed here:Placement Papers (TCS, Wipro, Infosys and 40 other companies)
Top B-School MBA Entrance Examinations (CAT, XAT, CMAT, etc.)
Government Jobs Examinations (SBI Clerk, Bank PO, IBPS PO, etc.)
Engineering (IIT JEE, AIEEE, GRE, Core Subjects, etc.)
Indian Railways SCRA Exams
Medical (AIIMS, AIPMT, etc.)
