ToOLOwl
TalentPad was a project that intended to target the White-collar private sector permanent job market in India. Out of the total working population in the country, which is, around 600mn, this team focused only 1% of that. Rest of the workforce in India is either Blue or Grey collar workers.
The Premise
The motivated team of TalentPad started with a premise that the existing marketplace (such as Naukari, Timesjobs, etc.) are relatively inefficient and in the mind of the founders, they were mere, a directory- directory of jobs, and a directory of CV. Instead, the demand of current market was a relevant small list.
The idea and motivation behind this project were to optimize the “Matching” process of the job with the right candidate. The team intended to achieve this goal using data technology and data science by capturing related data elements from both sides, i.e. job and CV. They used the data science rules to do the matching which is on its way to improvement with times as more data gets fed into the machine.
Lessons Learned
On the journey to TalentPad, the team learned a lot about the market. They observed that the market was a sum of three sub-markets.
- Senior Management (~$100 mn): This sub-market is based on trust, confidentiality, relationships and basically, lack of privacy. They also observed that over 90% market share in this segment belongs to executive search firms.
- Junior/ Mid-Management (<$300 mn): The primary concern of employers when they are making a hire in this submarket is, they are looking for individuals who can turn out to be good at the managerial roles. Domain knowledge, in this case, becomes a hygiene rather than an acceptance parameter.
In this case, the interviewer tries to focus and break down the person’s past work experiences. The individuals are interviewed in more detail, about tasks where they showed certain significant traits. This level of hiring also involves in-person meetings to determine whether the candidate will be a good manager or not.
- Junior/ Entry Level (>$200 mn): The one thing required to crack this, was to figure out a scalable way to up-skill talent, then access it and them finally to place him or her. The majority of this sub-market comes from industries such as IT/ITeS, BFSI, and Retail. Many people work with this level of candidates, such as recruiters and consultants.
Way Forward!
The TalentPad team soon realized that all these three divisions are completely different industries and needed completely different businesses. Also, the team observed, that some generic solutions can be applied across all the three levels, such as the development of a more optimized and easy to use list.
However, they also realized that it was tough to replace horizontal marketplace such as Naukri and LinkedIn unless you don’t have a solid value proposition. Additionally, there is an open opportunity to start on an assessment business, for non-technical skills to address the blue-collar market too.
The Bottom Line
Despite the failure of this project, the team is extremely proud of the customers and team members who believed in their work. They had a huge client base of 1500+ signups and 60,000+ technical customers sign ups.
The team of TalentPad, as promised have started working on an extremely new project. The proud team announces their new venture- Trevo. It is a venture that inclines technology with the public transport.
