CBREX hopes to cash in on demand for cross-border talent

Demand for talent in banking and finance, manufacturing, hospitality and technology drive the recruitment process for the Cross Border Recruitment Exchange platform (CBREX), an aggregate recruiter network.

CBREX is a platform that facilitates hiring across the globe by combining small and mid-size recruiters.

Indian appetite

CBREX’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Gautam Sinha told

BusinessLine in an interview that while demand by Indian companies for hiring from the US is high in the banking and finance sectors, they look to Europe for skills in the hospitality sector.

So far, the company has completed two transactions: one apiece in hospitality and logistics.

“Though America will be the biggest market in terms of size, India and China are catching up and together they will form 60 per cent our transactions,” he added.

6-lakh recruiter target

The start-up is spread across US, Europe, Africa, Malaysia, Philippines, Qatar and UAE in the Middle East and India.

“We want to increase the number of recruiters from 48 to 200 by September-end and get on board 6 lakh by 2018,” Sinha told BusinessLine .

The company began with a seed investment of ₹1.3 crore, translates 40 per cent of its demand into transactions, generating a gross trade value of ₹4-10 lakh per transaction. “By September-end we expect to complete ₹2-crore worth transaction,” Sinha said.

Who gets what

The company is a collection of recruiters who create demand and supply talent as per their client requirements. At the end of every transaction, the recruiter who creates the demand gets 30 per cent of the commission, the supplier obtains 50 per cent and the rest goes to the exchange.

Challenges ahead

Building robust technology infrastructure is a challenge CBREX faces.

Since the time taken for closing one transaction is 45-90 days, Sinha said, “When the number of recruiters goes up to 6 lakh, we expect 50,000 transactions at any given moment, so the technology has to hold up.”

The company is currently building an engineering team based out of Bangalore that would be dedicated to building the platform, whose first version will go live by September 1. The website, which currently features content only in English, will later include Mandarin, French and Spanish .