Clients might be next to God for a particular company, but it is the employes who finally please these Gods. These are the people who work behind the scenes, trying to achieve the best within their limits and fulfilling the promises that their company has made. So when it comes to employees, a company must choose them wisely.
Some people will work for your company and deliver as promised. Then some people will work, go a step ahead and add value to the deliverables that change a company from ‘just another one on the block’ to ‘the one’. Great employees have the potential to transform a company into a brand. So the next question is, how does one find great employees?
As someone who had spent considerable time as an impact investor in India and Africa, Paul Breloff and Simon Desjardins were facing the same question. They saw that recruitment and access to talent was consistently the number one barrier to growth, for promising enterprises.
Companies were drowning in piles of CVs, unable to objectively discern who would be best at the job, while candidates were stuck in a demoralizing cycle of applying to hundreds of jobs and never hearing back. This matching challenge for candidates was partly due to the vast majority of candidates not having had to support in understanding their own skills and preferences. It was also due to the difficulty of conveying one’s strengths through a CV, particularly for young people who have so few “conventional” credentials.
Employers find it extremely difficult to source and screen young talent objectively, leading to acute biases in the selection process such as favoritism for elite schools and name-brand employers that the vast majority of young job seekers lack.
Determined to find a solution, the duo, along with Matt Schnuck started Shortlist – a platform with the idea of connecting candidates and employers by leveraging smarter data and technology.
Shortlist takes a competency-based approach to sourcing and screening talent. It enables candidates to apply for jobs by demonstrating their skills online. While not cutting out human intervention entirely, it uses technology to objectively assess the potential of each candidate and provide everyone with feedback – a digital asset they can use to become more self-aware and apply for jobs elsewhere.
Here’s Paul, the Co-Founder and CEO, explaining how Shortlist acts as the perfect bridge between candidates and recruiters.
Tell us more about Shortlist.
Shortlist is a platform for great talent and great companies to find one another. On the Shortlist platform, job applicants and companies can create profiles. When a candidate is being screened for a potential role, they go through an intensive vetting process before making it to the client’s dashboard as a potential candidate.
First, a chatbot vets the candidate on basic parameters such as relocation, salary preference, and experience level, among other things. Next, during the assessment stage, the candidate performs on-the-job tasks (e.g., a finance candidate would answer questions about a balance sheet) to gauge their ability to excel in the role.
Based on these inputs, Shortlist creates a holistic, skills-based profile of the candidate for the employer to engage with on our platform. Shortlist also offers an industry-leading software platform, Shortlist Connect, for companies to help them attract, screen, and manage the talent recruitment process.
What were the challenges you came across during the inception of your startup?
When we started Shortlist and would approach employers, a lot of them were hesitant to adopt the tech-based approach to hiring. They still wanted to recruit partners to give them loads of CVs and judged a candidate’s merit by that alone.
It took some time for employers to open up to a more objective, assessment-based approach to evaluating candidates for their potential.
Is Shortlist bootstrapped or have you received funding or do you plan on approaching investors?
We closed a $2 million Series A raise in January last year. Our total funding so far has been $3 million. The round was led by Blue Haven Ventures, who were joined by Zephyr Acorn, Compass Venture Capital, and Rafiki.
We are also working closely with several philanthropic funders, including Shell Foundation, in support of our work in high impact sectors such as energy access.
Shortlist is already an Award-Winning, Globally-Recognised Talent Leader. We were recognized as one of the Top 5 Companies with Great People Managers’ by Forbes India. We were proud to have been selected as one of the “Top 10 startups” by Facebook India Innovation Accelerator program in 2019. Our CTO Sudheer Bandaru and I were featured in India’s Top 100 People Managers award list by Great Managers Institute in 2019.
As the CEO, what is your opinion on the current landscape of startup culture in India?
India has been very active in creating a healthy startup ecosystem and the growth in the number of startups every year is prolific. 1300 tech startups were added in 2019 alone. What helps this is the fact that India has the third-highest number of incubators and accelerators in the world. These incubators have nurtured innovative ideas and helped transform them into sustainable business models. The landscape here is innovative and vibrant. It has created many jobs and resolved consumer problems.
According to you, how important is it to be updated with technology as per your industry sector?
At Shortlist, technology is in our DNA. Our first employee was our CTO, and we know that tech goes a long way to reduce bias in HR decisions and make sure they’re data-driven. Great tech enables us to fulfill our mission: unlock professional potential.
How do you strategize on scaling Shortlist in the future?
Remote talent and distributed teams underpin the future of work. We are actively exploring and testing ways to deliver more and more value to job seekers, in order to help them stand out from the crowd and become eligible for jobs they might otherwise have never heard about.
Given that the world is learning how to work remotely, we anticipate that digital-ready and remote work will become a big part of what we do.
