How This Bengaluru-based Startup Taps Into Gig-economy and Helps Companies to Hire Talent Faster by Providing Interview-as-a-Service Solution

FloCareer is a state of the art Video and Telephonic interview platform with 500+ experts to provide world’s Best “Interview as a Service” solution. FloCareer strongly discourages the “mentality of scarcity” and encourage creativity & thinking big. FloCareer was launched in December 2017 by Mehul Bhatt. There are two founders of Flocareer:

• Mehul Bhatt, CoFounder & CEO – Ex-Cisco leader, Futurist, tech enthusiast: Mehul has spent more than a decade in various Silicon Valley startups in US as part of their core technology team. Mehul wanted to be part of growth story of India and started this venture after realizing how difficult it was to find right talents in almost all the organization where he worked.
• Mohit Jain, CoFounder & COO – Ex-Dell leader, Visionary, Perfectionist: Mohit has worked at large scale operations at MNCs like Dell, InfoSys as well as roaring startups. As part of his journey he realized the same talent search problem and resonated well with Mehul on solving this problem with a creative touch. He is the core of the science and art of the operations at FloCareer.

We are publishing an interview with Mehul:

Q.: What is the problem you are trying to solve? Please share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
Ans: We are helping hiring companies across the globe to hire right talent faster. We do so by enabling the hiring teams to focus on their core deliverable tasks and taking care of first few rounds of interviews on our platform using help from freelance industry experts.

People are the most important asset of any organization – and finding the right talent is always a critical and time consuming task for almost all companies. This is true irrespective of geography and domain of the company.

Q.: List all the names of the core Team Members, along with their Designated Roles.
Ans: Sure. They are:

• Mehul Bhatt, CoFounder & CEO – Ex-Cisco leader, Futurist, tech enthusiast: Mehul’s zeal for distributed, cloud based technology and futurist approach towards solving big problems is helping the startup to scale up to larger volumes and touching large number of lives.
• Mohit Jain, CoFounder & COO – Ex-Dell leader, Visionary, Perfectionist: Mohit’s vision of blending right amount of technology with people focused processes and operations ensures that FloCareer’s “Interview as a Service” platform reaps the benefits of cutting edge technologies like AI and ML while making the best use of freelancers’ collective contributions in the emerging gig economy.
• Pravin Agarwala, CoFounder & Strategic Advisor – Ex-SAP leader, Dreamer, Strategist: Pravin’s learnings from his another startup – BetterPlace Safety and Solutions is helping FloCareer to grow faster and make its own unique identity in the gig-economy space where distributed, on-demand work force across the globe is solving problems for small to large enterprises.

Q.: Tell us about the Product / Solution. How did you get your first customer? Explain how you went about the Product-Market Fit Process.
Ans: There are two innovations that FloCareer has made:

1. Standadization of Interviews
2. Uberization of Interviews

The process works as follows:

• Hiring companies articulate the kind of people they want
• Based on that, FloCareer’s online platform converts the subjective requirement into objective ones; and the rich and vibrant freelancers’ industry experts’ community structures the interview.
• Right set of practical questions are formalized along with grading criteria.
• Now, hiring companies just uploads the resumes on FloCareer platform.
• Platform uses Machine Learning to do a 3-way smart match among job requirements, candidate’s resume and profiles of more than 600 experts on the platform.
• About 7-10 relevant experts are notified about a new candidate to be interviewed
• One of the experts conduct the video interview using the interview structure previously identified.
• Hiring companies only take final interview of qualified candidates, and enjoy 80% or more selection ratio in their interviews.

Q.: What is your USP?
Ans: FloCareer’s two important innovations in terms of bringing objectivity to the subjective nature of the interviews by structuring the interviews and automating the scheduling of interviews through uberiziation are valued by customers a lot. Their 3-way smart matching is a patent pending technology.

Q.: What were your assumptions when you entered the market, learning that you have? Who in your mind is your ideal customer? Do you have at least one of them signed up?
Ans: When we entered the market, we knew that quality of experienced candidates is relatively difficult to find. However, we are amazed at the level of damage that we see in the market. If you talk about IT candidates, with 5 years or more experience, candidates are unable to write decent code. And that’s the main reason, companies are suffering a lot to filter out candidates.

Our ideal customers are fast growing companies. We are working with Wipro since last one and half years and growing with them. On product companies front, we have fast growing startups like Rapido Bikes, Citius Tech and Craft Silicon as our recently acquired customers.

Q.: What has been your biggest failure as an entrepreneur and what did you learn from it??
Ans: Entrepreneurial journey is the journey of constant learning. It has helped me to be a wholesome person – mostly we live in various compartments, and they don’t overlap. During the first one and half years, I was giving sole importance to the end results and not enjoying the journey. I was at the historical high weight because I also stopped running. Later I realized that being happy as part of the journey is equally, or probably more important. We took series of steps to have happier team, almost all of us ran half marathon together this year. We have installed a “good news” bell in our company. I lost 6 kg of weight and came to the healthy BMI. And we are growing as a company – acquiring more customers, touching more lives, helping companies in India as well as in USA to grow!

Q.8: How are you pricing the Product? What is the logic behind it? What is the model you are following – Free / Freemium / Premium etc. ? Explain your thought process.
Ans: We are into B2B space, and we have subscription model for our customers. Customers save almost 50% of their hiring cost when they opt for our model. That makes a win/win/win situation for customers, us as a service provider, and the freelancers who provide the service.

Q.: Please tell us about the investors (if any)
Ans: We are currently funded by a team of angel investors. Notable mention from that are:

Krish Balasubramanian – Global Technology Leader
Satish Jajodia, Advisor & Investor – Ex-CEO, Education Dynamics, Strategist, Advisor

Q.: Is there any interesting success story of your startup? If yes, please write about it. ?
Ans: We have success stories from our customer side as well as from the freelancers’ front. There are talented women freelancers who have good number of industry experience under their belt, and for various reasons they are not able to work full time at the moment. They enjoy working with us, get intellectual satisfaction from facing different kind of interviews for different organization across the globe and make a decent living through the process.

For companies, when we provide the in-depth analytics around their sourcing channels’ efficiency and five to ten folds turn around time, it becomes a wow factor for them! For example, one of the MNCs did a pilot run with us. We got 100 interviews done for them in a month with less than 48 hours of turn around time per candidate. Following month, while the procurement team was working with us and hiring team was forced again to take in-house interviews, they could barely manage 18 interviews from in-house team. Naturally, the in-house team’s focus is not interviews, but their core project tasks.

Q.: Since inception, give us a sense of the value of business done by your venture? Please explain in detail. (e.g., What is the current turnover? From Launching till date total no. of visitors on website/persons registered/enquiries and enrollment etc.)
Ans: We have conducted more than 20,000 video interviews at this point, and growing our network of experts far beyond 600+ freelancers that we have at the moment. We started our journey in India, but now we are serving in USA and UK too; and we are acquiring 4 to 5 new customers outside of India per month on an average since last 6 months.

Q.: What is the big picture of your startup? Is this Product/service leading to something bigger? If so, how?
Ans: We envision that just resume to apply for the job would become a history. On resume, you have only skills self-claimed by you. Outsourcing of first few rounds of interviews, and having a pool of pre-interviewed candidate would become a norm; with FloCareer pioneering and leading the trend. Gig economy is growing fast across the globe, and FloCareer model would be yet another fuel to grow it faster.

Q.: Who do You Perceive as Your Competition? How do you differentiate yourself with them?
Ans: “Interview as a Service” is relatively a new field, and there are no big, established players in the market. We differentiate by having tech founders, and ability to understand the problem of skills validation from the hiring team’s point of view. Our entire approach towards the solution is driven by that.

Given that “Interview as a Service” is a new phenomenon, many times people compare us with consultancies and recruiting agencies. They are not our competitors, we work orthogonally with them. In fact, many consulting companies are our clients in US; those who want to ensure that they send quality candidates to their clients.

Q.: What would be your goal to accomplish in the next six months? Any other information you would like to share?
Ans: Scaling beyond Indian geography and entering into semi-skilled jobs domain with our automated bot-based video interviews are our next two major goals. We are making good progress in US and couple of other geographies we are planning to get started soon.

Q.: What message do you want to convey to fellow entrepreneurs?
Ans: Doing a bit of soul searching and answering the big “why” questions are critical when anybody is planning to start the entrepreneurial journey. Those who have already taken a step, and still struggling, I would say – just stay put, and be ambitious. Almost all entrepreneur have experienced “near death experience” of their ventures. I just met a couple of very successful startup founders and they shared the same feeling!

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Thanks Mehul. All the best!