The world of job recruiting has changed drastically in recent years. Decades ago, the route to securing employment was simply getting your resume together and responding to advertisements – or even getting approached by a headhunter. In the past 5 years we have seen much of the recruitment process happening on the Internet where both recruiters and job seekers are interacting with each other through mediums like online social networks. The last two years have been more innovative in the history of recruitment in India. With technology solution based startups mushrooming, we now have platforms which make hiring quick, timely and effective in a market which is till today dominated by staffing agencies, job boards and company HR. As a result India’s recruitment sector is back on the agenda of venture capital investors after more than a decade as they ‘back’ a set of niche startups in the space.

In India the ‘Talent Acquisition Pyramid’ becomes more conventional’ as we move up with seniority of hiring, defining the process of hiring (leadership positions getting filled through references or headhunting in the traditional manner. With ‘Digital India” being proclaimed as our future from corporate to parliament, technology can still act like a hurdle (at times) where hiring individuals are involved. Recruitment is and will remain an art which has its own ‘degree of human element’ which makes it unpredictable at any given point of time. Having said that, the current trends and experimentation going on this sector should be closely watched to see ‘where it is headed’. Whether it might revolutionize the recruitment sector or just end up setting limitations of technology in recruitment is to be seen.

Some of these new-age hiring firms and their offerings are as follows:

MyNoticePeriod.com

When Abhijit Khasnis was working at Yahoo, he consistently faced the “revolving door” phenomenon, with potential hires backing out of offers either because of fatter pay cheques being offered by competitors, cross-negotiation with current employers or long notice periods. He mentioned in an interview – “Negotiations would go on for several weeks. And then, in the last lap, the candidates would inform us that they have an offer from a competitor. In product companies, time to market is critical and if you can’t on-board talent in time, it’s a huge problem.”

Abhijit saw a huge potential in solving this problem. He, together with Manjunath Talwar, a former colleague at Yahoo in January 2014, started mynoticeperiod.com, a web portal to find candidates serving notice periods in order to reduce the hiring lead time. Incubated at Nasscom’s Startup Warehouse in Bangalore, mynoticeperiod.com has a database of over 8,000 job seekers serving their notice periods and 800 recruiters accessing the database. The company also rolled out an industry-first recruiter Android mobile application that allows faster real-time communication between recruiters and candidates, using familiar channels like WhatsApp, SMS and schedulers. The Founders believe that the market opportunity is huge considering that the IT sector alone has about 4.5 lac people changing their jobs every year. The portal makes it mandatory for job seekers to declare the best offer — title and salary — and expires the profiles at the end of the notice period. The company is looking to expand base to Europe because the waiting periods there extend up to six months. The company had earlier risen over INR 2 crore from individual angel investors and IDG Ventures, in September 2014. And now, it has raised a follow up “Series A” round of INR 18 crores from IDG Ventures.

GrownOut.com

GrownOut Solutions Pvt. Ltd. offers an online referral hiring platform that enables organizations to leverage their employees’ professional network. As experienced “Referral” candidates are generally hired faster and stay with the companies much longer as compared to any other recruiting medium. The company’s vision is to products such techniques and serves their clients using online platforms and emerges as a primary hiring tool for the industry.

GrownOut was founded by Sumit Gupta, a Computer Science graduate from Indraprastha University (Delhi), and Harsimran Walia, a graduate from IIT Delhi. Sumit and Harsimran started working on Grownout in January 2013. During the alpha and beta development phases, both of them worked from Chandigarh and Himalayas. They shifted base to New Delhi after completing a beta version of the product, which they launched in November 2013. Currently it counts companies like Quikr, Ola, Appiterate, Stayzilla and Winshuttle amongst its clients. This business-to-business startup based on a SaaS model had earlier raised an undisclosed sum in funding from Outbox Ventures. In October 2014 Matrix Partners India has invested in the first institutional round of funding for them. Grownout will use the funds for deepening its analytics expertise, product development and growing its business.

TalentPad.com

TalentPad was cofounded in 2014 by IIT and IIM alumnus, Mayank Jain, Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain. It is a filtered marketplace, with companies having to be ‘eligible’ to participate and it offers candidates the opportunity of instant visibility to across 150 targeted employers. There is filtration on the candidate side too, with the focus being on the tier 1 technology talent in the country.

TalentPad has risen funding from Helion Advisors. The amount of funding has not been disclosed, but it’ll be used to fuel the company’s marketing initiatives and scale up the team. The ability to curate both supply and demand to ensure perfect matchmaking has led to TalentPad currently working with 150 companies including the likes of InMobi, MakeMyTrip, Snapdeal, Myntra and BookMyShow. Companies pay a percentage of the gross salary, as a fee, for every candidate hired. The services are free for candidates. Once the candidate submits a detailed profile for approval, TalentPad’s team evaluates the candidature. Handpicked candidates, who get selected, participate in the upcoming auction called Talent Fair. During the weeklong auction, employers compete to hand them interview offers online. A candidate can receive up to 10 interview offers. Post that, the candidate decides where to be interviewed and the interview process starts.

InstaHyre.com

Hiring needs to be disrupted as per the NCR based company InstaHyre.com, which wants to do that by mixing auction and hiring. Instahyre holds auctions where candidates receive offers from multiple vetted companies with compensation mentioned upfront. Companies get access to a set of curated candidates, with a different set in each auction. Each candidate is thoroughly screened to ensure quality. InstaHyre’s selling point is simple: Efficiency in hiring process. What takes months and regular effort on job boards takes a week on the platform.

More than 60 tech companies are already using it, including Zomato, Practo, Wingify and Akosha. Instahyre is founded by Aditya Rajgarhia and Sahil Gupta, two computer science graduates from Stanford University and IIT Ropar respectively, in February 2014.

MyRefers.com

This platform simply connects your social friends’ circle and with just a single click allows you to refer jobs. When the job reaches the employer, employers check out the applications on a single dashboard and takes action. MyRefers is working towards creating a skills marketplace powered by referrals and enabled by data intelligence.

The brainchild of ex-VP of Star TV, Lalit and Avish Anand, Myrefers has around 35 firms on board, including HCL, Yepme, Mahindra & Mahindra, Iprospect c2, Reliance Digital, STAR TV Makemytrip, Trivone Digital and Dentsu. It has also risen an undisclosed amount of “pre-Series A” funding from Venture Capital firm Bedrock Ventures. The funds will be used in building the product and sprucing up the technological aspect. The company works on a subscription model, based on which it gets paid by the companies it has on board. Vivek Bihani, CEO of Bedrock Ventures, said, “MyRefers extends the boundaries of the established concept of Employee Referral Schemes beyond the organization and aims to address the challenges encountered in this process.