During Social Distancing; We Are Staying Connected 24x7: Bipul Vaibhav, CEO & Co-founder, Skillate

Do you think that technology would hamper people's relationship building?

In many ways technology actually empowers relationships between people. Just see the current situation, even though we all are stuck in our houses, we are staying connected 24*7 and are fulfilling the commitments of personal as well as professional relationships. Without technology that would be hard to imagine.

What is that one thing you like about your work?

Working with a dynamic team of highly motivated and skilled professionals. In Skillate, every individual is an entrepreneur. Everyone owns their space. I can’t wait to go back to the office once things are normal and meet my friends and colleagues.

As a founder, what is that one idea hit the mind that made you initiate Skillate?

In January 2015, I was working for an analytics software company in Chennai. Unhappy with my role, I contacted various organizations with openings, but to no avail. The frustrating part was not that I was getting rejected, but that often, I would simply not receive any response from the recruiters. I had no clarity on what stage my applications were getting rejected, or even if they were noticed at all! This got me thinking about the lack of transparency prevalent in the recruitment process. I realized that even though candidates desperately want a response from the company on the stature of their candidature, large corporations often don’t have the time and bandwidth to respond to every candidate at each stage of the hiring process. With corporates receiving millions of applications every year, the unstructured hiring process not only keeps the candidates in the dark but also deprives organizations of the best talents.

This led me and my co-founders - Sambhav and Anand to form Skillate, an AI-based platform that makes recruitment easy, fast, and transparent with its cutting edge technology.

How are you able to manage the sanity and happiness in your organization in these bad times?

We have provided WFH to all our employees and will continue to do so till the situation doesn't come to normal. Being a startup allows us to be a lot more flexible with our approach to work.

Actually, in the past few weeks, we have seen an amazing boost in productivity. We have been able to finish some of the long-pending items which we are not able to because of continuous business engagements and expectations. We never thought we could manage our work so efficiently while working from our houses! I believe that this dire situation is a chance for corporates to use more technology in their processes and revolutionize the working culture in the long run.

What problem does Skillate solve and how?

Skillate solutions are solving the following problems:

Candidate sourcing: Skillate’s new-age sourcing methodology continuously expands your central database through a connected network of resources: job boards, emails, ATS, consultancies, referrals, career pages, etc. Skillate solutions help you utilize your central database better.

Candidate screening: Skillate Chatbot and AI-powered matching, thinks like a recruiter, and provides AI-backed scores for candidates based on education, experience, and skill levels.

The intelligent platform provides ‘much beyond a keyword match’, and understands patterns and context to ensure that you never miss out on a quality candidate.

Candidate experience: The Conversational AI of our chatbot automates communication and creates personalized candidate experiences at scale. It captures information beyond resumes (for ex.- shift and relocation readiness) and keeps the information repository fresh. Our JD assistant, on the other hand, gives real-time feedback to recruiters on their JD and helps them in writing detailed job descriptions to attract the best candidates.

Automated resume parsing: AI and Deep Learning-based model trained on 120 Million profiles to understand the semantics of each and every statement present in the resume.

Job v/s resume matching: Persona Matching rather than Keyword Matching. Recommendation based on Industry, desired skills, roles, and responsibilities to get the best candidates in a click.

What is unique about Skillate’s technology?

Skillate’s core tech has automated the hiring process, as it collects resumes from all potential sources such as internal database, ATS, Google Drive, mailbox, referrals, external agencies, and career pages, and runs its sophisticated machine learning model on the incoming resumes. It then makes sense of data and intrinsically assigns quality scores on multiple criteria. Skillate also makes sense of the job requirements and runs its matching algorithm on a wide array of complex criteria to sort those candidates in decreasing order of their relevance. Skillate provides many tools around this tech to enable recruiters to quickly make decisions and push forward in the hiring pipeline.

Please provide some information on your clients.

Skillate team has worked with several enterprise customers, including OYO Rooms, Sopra Steria, RBL Banks, and L&T Construction. We work on a yearly subscription model for small, medium, and large accounts. Working with us, our clients have achieved the following benefits:

· Reduced hiring time by 65%

· Cost per hire by more than 30%

· 40% Lesser Interviews

· 2.2x conversions