Today, every organisation wants to achieve more with less. Competition and pace of business has resulted in companies over-hiring or under-hiring, both of which impact the bottom line. With the growing emphasis on the Internet and social media as power channels to aid hiring, there is immense scope in being innovative to find the right talent. In addition, organisations can no longer afford to hire large recruitment teams to work on managing their backend processes.

Outsourcing tactical tasks and focusing on the strategic aspects; be it finding ways to reach out to the passive job seeker or making the employee referral program more robust is the need of the hour. For a recruiter, the screening process is becoming increasingly complex with credentials being exaggerated by a potential candidate.

Adopting technology can solve many of these issues by actively involving all stakeholders and ensuring a higher ownership. We take a look at some technology services and products making a buzz in the recruitment market.

HireMantra (www. hiremantra.com)

With job portals and social media facilitating job access, organisations have started to generate a massive volume of potential candidate profiles that cannot be processed manually. HireMantra is an e-recruitment consultant offering a technology driven end-to-end solutions from posting the job on the top job boards (including social media) and using smart matching and mining technologies (artificial intelligence-based search engine) to screen and shortlist the right profiles.

Subodh Vinchurkar, founder and director-business development, has created HireMantra to solve the most essential needs of the hiring process in order to create business value. In Vinchurkar’s experience, especially for startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), getting the right talent is a big challenge; it’s a chicken-and-egg story. Startups and SMEs do not have a brand name to attract a candidate, but cannot succeed without the right people.

HireMantra’s technology platform is structured as a cloud based SaaS (software-as-a-service platform) that can be accessed over the Internet enabling companies to use the platform within 10 minutes of signing up. HireMantra can help startup CEOs save time as well as improve cost efficiencies, considering that the time it takes to fill a position is an unrealised opportunity cost.

Founder: Subodh Vinchurkar

USP: Uses artificial intelligence to match jobs with candidates. One stop destination to post jobs onto multiple job portals and social media

Interviewstreet (www. interviewstreet.com)

For recruiters in technology companies finding the right profile is a tough task. Often uncalculated, there is a wasted opportunity cost that can be spent more meaningfully. For instance, for every 10 telephonic interviews conducted, only two profiles are shortlisted. This is a fairly telling number since what is furnished in the resumes is vastly different from the real skills and competencies of the potential candidates.

Interviewstreet offers a product that assesses the real skills of the candidates and weed out the misfits to help companies conserve their selection time. Vivek Ravisankar, co-founder, Interviewstreet, says that the company’s product can help screen candidates with custom programming tests. Interviewstreet has built a code checker that evaluates a candidate’s code based on correctness and optimality, thereby helping the recruiter identify the right fit programmers at an early stage. Interviewstreet offers an online product to help companies (be it for campus or lateral hiring) create customised tests as an effective replacement of the written tests and phone interviews. In the future, Interviewstreet would be launching a solution that would rank potential candidates against their ability to solve a programming challenge. The company is also working on making the campus placement process more web-based.

Co-founder: Vivek Ravisankar

USP: Customised tests and a code checker that evaluates a candidate’s code based on correctness and optimality, thereby helping technology companies identify the right programmers

ReSolute (www.ScaleneWorks.com)

ReSolute, the talent acquisition solution offered by Scalene Works People Solutions is an enterprise-class recruitment workflow product built by recruiters for recruiters. Having been in the IT industry as a recruitment manager, chief-executive officer, Sanjay Shelvankar, found a major lacuna in recruitment products, which help stakeholders mitigate risks and make timely decisions. ReSolute is dashboard-backwards driven software that is built for helping recruitment teams in strategic planning, governance, productivity enhancement and complete automation. The product offers transparency, timely reports and maintains a risk register to provide adequate contingencies in the event that the partner group is unable to meet its targets on time.

According to Shelvankar, hiring managers spend a lot of time following up with the recruiters on the recruitment status. In this context, ReSolute offers a real-time dashboard that consolidates all stakeholders – be it the recruiter, the hiring manager or the third party reference check agency and gets them under one umbrella to improve the hiring performance, which is data driven. The product ensures that the business impact in terms of the overall performance of the talent acquisition performance is felt. ReSolute can be deployed as a hosted, managed or in-premise solution depending on the customer’s requirement. It also can be interoperated with existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems like SAP or an in-house human resource management system.

CEO: Sanjay Shelvankar

USP: Offers a real-time dashboard that consolidates all stakeholders – be it the recruiter, the hiring manager or the third party reference check agency

eLitmus(www.elitmus.com)

eLitmus offers a well-researched employability test (pH test) for entry-level engineers. The pH publishes a pH test score that offers a filter for organisations hiring fresh engineers, based on the specific needs of the requirement or job profile. In turn, the platform saves almost 95 per cent effort at the pre-evaluation phase. The test can be administered both on-campus and at predetermined test centres (off-campus). The pH test provides a level playing field to students who are not studying in the top Tier-I or Tier-II city colleges or those that are really interested in niche product development or analytics jobs, where companies do not hire in large numbers and are denied the coveted slots during campus placements.

eLitmus is a virtual campus built on an open source web application framework and on open source technology to offer services such as publishing job advertisements, capturing interested applications, processing applications through a rule engine, scheduling of interviews, end-to-end tracking of process etc. According to Aseem Marwaha, director-corporate business, “Companies in the higher value chain with a known brand are short on interviewing bandwidth and the lesser known brands do not know how to reach out to the right candidates.” Be it in times of a slowdown or economic recovery, in both contexts, companies need the flexibility of numbers. It partners to ensure the right volume of hiring in every business cycle. Organisations can pay eLitmus only when they are satisfied with the performance of the candidate on the job.

Director-corporate business: Aseem Marwaha

USP: A well-researched employability test (pH test) for entry-level engineers, administered both on-campus and at predetermined test centres