Startup Mantra: Helping firms to hire effective workforce
The skills intelligence and skills assessment platform iMocha enables leaders on the employment front
Pune: Two major news related to talent acquisition rocked the Indian IT industry in the recent past. The fresh one was bribe-for-jobs while the other was about involuntary attrition (firing) of employees who had forged experiences on their resumes. Some may say that the online recruitment process during and after Covid-19 was to blame, but recruiters across industry domain recall that such incidences were also rampant before the pandemic struck. Verifying or validating skillset possessed by candidates take several days or weeks resulting in wastage of time, human resources, and money apart from the business loss borne by the company.
Amit Mishra and Sujit Karpe, cofounders of Pune-based technology startup iMocha (erstwhile known as Interview Mocha), realised this pain especially in the IT industry and developed an artificial intelligence (AI) based solution for talent acquisition, talent assessment and skills intelligence. iMocha, currently valued at around ₹800 crore, has launched an AI-based solution which derives inferences while the employees work on their job and crawl their social footprints to provide skill intelligence to the employer.
Slum kid to IT professional
Amit’s story is inspirational for anyone who dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. Born and raised at a slum-like locality in Amravati and studied at a Marathi-medium municipal school, Amit got a chance to explore the corporate life after he cleared his computer engineering from Amravati’s Government Engineering College.
Amit said, “My father is a journalist and ran a school for underprivileged children. My mother started learning to read and write when I was in sixth grade. Some of my childhood friends have become butchers, sweepers, and even thieves. Parents never stopped me from interacting with other kids in the locality and family values gave me the strength to be away from substance abuse and other bad habits generally associated with such places. After graduating, I moved to Pune in 2001 and started looking for a job. Six months later, I joined at small company. Later, I worked at IBM and HSBC.
“In my first job, I found myself unexpectedly placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP), and it seemed like my manager wanted me out. However, this ignited my entrepreneurial spirit, and I came up with the idea of starting an ice-gola (shaved ice) cart on Fergusson College Road. After receiving the news about being on the PIP, I took a 12-hour bus journey to Amravati to visit my family. Though my parents supported my entrepreneurial aspirations, they told me not to run away from my responsibilities in the company. Motivated by their advice, I resumed work with more dedication and sometimes even putting in 22 hours in a day. Eventually, I successfully got out of PIP and earned the fruits of hard work,” he said.
“Later, I moved on to IBM, where I met Sujit, a mischievous yet enthusiastic colleague. The company gave me the opportunity to work from home, which was quite uncommon 18 years ago. In 2004, I invited some of my friends from Amravati to share my flat, and together we started selling snack at my company’s canteen.
“I was leading a team of 20 people within just three years of my joining the firm. One day, while I was hanging out with my friends on the company premises, a close childhood friend who worked at the canteen greeted me, but I did not give him proper attention. At that moment, I realised that my ego had taken hold of me to neglect my childhood friend because of social status. To make amends for my behaviour, I used to sit near Khadakwasla Dam Chowpatty and sell snack items. I was running a business, but did not have a clear vision about future plans,” Amit said.
Starting entrepreneurial journey
Amit later moved on to another company in the banking domain, but quit the job in 2006 to become an entrepreneur.
Amit along with Sujit and four other friends had decided to start a company. “We decided to meet daily for six months at a fixed time and whoever stays till the end would be the final partners or cofounders of the company. Only Sujit and I stayed till the last while the others dropped due to some reasons,” Amit said.
“We started providing IT services in Lotus Domino, a business collaboration software for hosting critical applications, messaging (enterprise-grade email) and workflow, and providing security features for business-critical information. We got into this technology in business process management, which was later replaced by Microsoft’s document management and collaboration platform. We grew to a decent annual revenue of about ₹8 crore for about six years and were able to recruit about 450 freshers. The company was acquired by Ecotech IT Services and we entered a two-year lock-in period which ended in 2015.”
Interview Mocha
Amit and Sujit were inspired by Indian entrepreneurs like Sridhar Vembu (founder-CEO, Zoho Corporation), Girish Mathrubootham (founder-CEO, Freshworks) and others.
Sharing lessons from the first venture, Amit said, “I had realised that business is not about you. It is about a bigger ecosystem, people who are with you and rules that need to be followed. Before our lock-in period was over, Sujit and I were thinking about solving problems related to recruitment. One day, while sipping coffee, we came up with the name ‘Interview Mocha’ for our next venture. As the domain was also available, we finalised it.”
Amit shared an interesting turn of events, “Once I was travelling from Satara to Pune with a common friend in a vehicle that was shared by a German investor Wolfgang Hoeltgen. Hoeltgen was impressed by our business idea during our casual conversation and wrote a cheque of ₹60 lakh as investment in our company.”
Interview technology
Explaining the problems faced by recruiters and companies, Amit said, “Candidates are generally very lavish with their resumes. Recruiters judge any applicant based on the information furnished in the resume. A candidate attending a training for a week, includes it as an experience in the resume. Due to such lacunae in the application process, 7 out of 10 applications were found not fit for the job roles they were shortlisted by recruiters. Hiring managers cribbed about the time and energy wasted on interviewing the candidate and subsequent business loss to the company due to lack of skilled workforce. We also had faced similar issues with our previous company.”
“We started building a technology product for candidate interviews and assessment. We came up with five questions in five minutes pre-recorded interview of candidates which could be assessed by the hiring managers and then invite only relevant candidates for in-person interview. Later, we realised we can watch web-series or movies for hours together since it is entertainment, but not recorded interviews. Even the five-minute recorded interview assessment was becoming a challenge for hiring managers,” Amit said.
Quantifying skills
Another problem which the duo identified, especially in IT companies, was that of quantifying skills. There was no such mechanism in the traditional model of interview and assessment and hence we entered skill testing and skill assessment, the duo said.
Sujit said, “We started creating different tests for different job roles as interview solutions. We also tried to address the issues of bias during interviews. We got 13 customers paying us ₹5,000 per month with our monthly recurring revenue (MRR) reaching ₹65,000 in the first financial year of operations. These companies were giving us business since they knew us, but it was not feasible and profitable to scale up. So, we registered for the JioGenNext and Microsoft accelerator programme in Mumbai and through them connected with one of oldest software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup community ‘SaaSBOOMi’ in March 2015. These two platforms helped us unlearn services and learn SaaS business model.”
Value proposition
iMocha touched MRR of ₹10 lakh with 600 customers from 80 countries in 2019. During a SaaS meet-up in Chennai, Amit met another founder who asked a pertinent question. “Are you ashamed or proud of having ₹10 lakh MRR from 600 customers,” the founder had asked Amit. This question made Amit realise whether they really need 600 customers to do a business of ₹10 lakh per month.
Amit said, “I realised that we are lacking focus in our business. We had several customers, including some one-person-companies paying $49 ( ₹4,000) or $99 ( ₹8,100) platform fees and some 40 big companies from the US but we never talked to them. Hence, we increased our pricing 4x and the result was that small companies discontinued but still our revenue grew. Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, a SaaS PMF (product-market fit) coach and founder of startup accelerator Upekkha helped us at this stage. We were just doing skill assessment in recruitment process for technology companies, but for growing big we also needed to serve the learning and development (L&D) vertical too for identifying skill gap, find out if training is being grasped by employees properly and then conduct an assessment.”
“We realised that we need to be at the right place, at the right time and with the right customer. It is not about the number of customers you are serving, but the value you are providing them. In 2021, our MRR touched ₹1.2 crore. We were fortunate to get eight Fortune 500 companies from telecom, IT, and banking sectors,” Amit said.
Investor experience
Amit said, “Covid had an impact on our business for the first quarter. I wanted to raise funds and started calling everyone who had helped me in my journey so far. I asked them to invest in the company. Out of 14 people I called, 11 invested in the company with a total of ₹5 crore. More than money, I wanted their blessings, their network access. After the fund raise and Covid situation easing out, markets reopened and interviews were being conducted online. I realised that we can create a big company now. Our revenue touched MRR ₹2 crore in next few months and then ₹4 crore in just 1.5 years’ time. We then got our first institutional fund raise of ₹108 crore from Eight Roads Venture at a valuation of about ₹800 crore.”
Skill-first organisations
Amit and Sujit were buoyed by the success, but they also foresaw the headwinds in IT sector. Amit said, “We had IT companies as our customer. There was over-hiring during Covid-19 time and now IT industries were facing productivity and operational efficiency issues. So, we decided to focus outside IT and started developing solutions for other industries like banking, telecom, etc.”
“We came up with a solution for skill-first organisations. Skill-first organisation means those which focus on skills of their existing and potential employees instead of just experience and degree. Skills are changing fast and organisation focus is changing from rigid job-based thinking to skills and training. Degree used to be the deciding factor in a job earlier, but now employees have very good opportunity to prove their merit and get any job by acquiring the required skills. Focussing on skills also gets companies a diverse and non-biased crowd.”
“We have successfully created a skill taxonomy and skills ontology for three domains like banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), telecom and IT industry. We map all job roles into the skill profiles and proficiency required and provide skill intelligence to the companies. Once a job profile is created, it can be validated through multiple channels, assessment can be self-declared or approved by manager, and the platform can be integrated with different systems like HRMS, recruitment and project management systems. We run AI on top of this which helps us to gather inferences while the employees are doing their job. We have a financial institution from US as our client, two from Middle East and 1 from India,” stated Amit.
Soonicorn
Amit claims, “We have a team of 200+ employees. Our business from talent acquisition, talent management and skills intelligence are integrated. Our MRR breakup would be 70 per cent from talent acquisition and 30 per cent from talent management. We will soon cross the MRR ₹100 crore mark. Customers pay us average ₹1 crore to ₹5 crore per year. Our plan for next 3 to 5 years is to generate a global revenue and get a decent unicorn valuation. In long run, skill-transformation is a big challenge for industries. Skill is the new currency and we are transforming from a knowledge-based economy to skill-based economy. We are helping companies transform in this journey.”
