In 2011, when Vijay Sharma headed marketing in
doctor appointment booking platform Practo, he was given an assignment to hire
people. The chemistry post-graduate from the Birla Institute of Technology and
Science did an earnest job. He trolled social media profiles of potential
hires. He scanned not just the big three social media- LinkedIn, Facebook and
Twitter- but other social communities like Quora, Angellist, Github, Dribble,
Foursquare and Instagram. He made cold calls based on candidates’ profile. Soon
he was sitting on a powerhouse of candidate data on an Excel sheet. And using
that data, he hired 50 people for Practo for marketing, engineering and
technical roles. But he didn’t stay in Practo long. Within six months of
joining the company, a desire to start a venture of his own pushed him to
co-found cloud telephony firm Exotel. As a co-founder, he had to wear many hats
and recruitment was one of major ones. But the excitement of Exotel started
wearing away by the third year. “I switched off. I used to tweet, and put up
Facebook posts at least twice or thrice a day. But that drastically reduced,”
he says. Sharma’s mother, who follows him on twitter, realized something was
amiss. One day, in 2014, she told him: “I know you will end up doing something
stupid. But if you really want to do something good, do it where your heart and
passion lie.” That was a turning point. He decided to start a venture in
recruitment solutions, one that would enable companies to hire by analysis a
candidate’s profile on social media platforms and other public sources using
data science and predictive analytics.
He
roped in his BITSian junior of four years, Sudheendra Chippagari, who in turn
brought with him two other BITSians, Saiteja Veera and Rishabh Kaul. “It was a
BITSian mafia of sorts. In fact, 30 out of the 70 employees are from BITS
Pilani,” Sharma laughs. They called their venture Belong. “It was clearly my
calling. I realized being an entrepreneur today is relatively risk-free. You
will find other entrepreneurs wanting to hire you in case you don’t make it.
The experience is invaluable. Besides, I thought persistence always pays,”
Sharma says. By the middle of 2014, Belong has raised $5 million in Series A
funding led by Matrix Partners India. The venture also has high profile
investors like Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Blume Ventures,
redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama, and Sierra Atlantic founder Raju Reddy. Belong’s
clients include Ola, Practo, and Snapdeal, for who it has hired over 130 people
in the past few months with an average salary of Rs 24 lakh.
“In
one case, our algorithm identified a candidate for a company and it turned out
that the candidate had on social media pointed out a technical flaw in a
product developed by that same company. The company promptly hired him,” says
Sharma. He said his objective is to make the recruitment engine mimic the human
mind, and support it with data.
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