Gurgaon-based talent acquisition startup Kickstart Jobs has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a group of investors led by ah! Ventures. Kickstart Jobs is a startup focusing on blue and grey collar entry level workforce.
Investors like Vivek Joshi, Founder of Wyzen Tech, Mohit Satyanand, Chairman of Team Works Art; Amit Banati, President (Asia Pacific), Kellogg’s; Arun Khanna – President (Asia), Dun and Bradstreet participated in the round.
Kickstart Jobs was founded in August 2015 by XLRI Jamshedpur graduate Samriddhi Malhotra and Abhishek Srivastava, a mechanical engineer from ISM Dhanbad. The company is focused towards helping the entry-level workforce connect with prospective employers. It is currently operational in Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon.
The startup, with about 10 employees, has already registered more than 5,000 candidates, enlisted about 3,000 vacancies, conducted more than 2,000 interviews and boasts a month-on-month growth of 100 per cent in the number of candidates scheduled for interviews via their platform.
Kickstart has developed a unique operational proposition, wherein ‘Leaders’ are identified among the communities of job seekers and are in turn collaborated with, to use their strong network and connect with the entry level job seekers over a mobile app.
Samriddhi Malhotra, Founder, Kickstart Jobs, said in a statement that, “The market for entry level hiring is one with both tremendous potential as well as enormous challenges. Kickstart is attempting to do just that. We have closely observed existing patterns of job seeking at the entry level workforce and are leveraging this existing pattern and enabling it with technology.”
Harshad Lahoti, Founder and CEO of ah! Ventures said, “The potential in Kickstart Jobs is not only in terms of their strong team but also in their unique methodology in operating and creating value for both, the job seeker and the employer. In our opinion such a product was long overdue, especially in a growing market like India, and we are sure to see stupendous success in the future of Kickstart Jobs.”
Lahoti further added that the growth in this sector is about to unfold with over 500+ million workforce already present in the blue & grey collar ecosystem of India. And, given the fact that this number is increasing at about 12 million per year, the need to effectively harness these human resources becomes all the more essential.
"Unfortunately, this turn of events has still not transcended into the concurrent employment it should encourage, especially in the blue and grey collar jobs market. The core of this rut lies in the fact that there has been no bridge that connects the eager job seekers with the right employers, " he said.