START-UP ISLAND. Robust ecosystems need many hands that clap

In the last edition of Start-up Island and others in the past, we’ve engaged with the theme of failure to find that a key concern is the strength of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. To have a story that survives into the ages, it is understood that individuals and companies build today for tomorrow.

In India, as anywhere else, while creating innovative enterprise is important, what is also vital is that small to large enterprises come together to help make the ecosystem robust. What this means on the ground is, like we saw a fortnight ago, start-ups thinking of helping counterparts. Two stories in this edition showcase further how this can be done.

Shaping careers For the sake of the technology and product economy that many experts have been laying emphasis on, for start-ups to be able to hire the best from a booming talent market, and for large well-established brands to reinvent themselves in areas like recruitment that are key to core business, talent has to be groomed early on.

LetsCorp has a model that redefines what ‘early’ means while also preparing individuals to make better career decisions.

“Most career choices are accidents, and that is sometimes showcased in our own lives,” says Shravan Charya, Founder and CEO of LetsCorp, summarising what has occurred in countries such as India.

From higher secondary at school to specialisations like IT or electronics in engineering, many students make choices not always aware of their own core competencies, not ever asking themselves if their skills and strengths match the professional aspirations they have.

“We begin at 6th grade and help students understand what their innate qualities are. We move on to providing ‘career guidance assessments’ that help a student understand if his/her interest matches his/her strongest qualities. Then we let the individual know if he/she may do better as a historian,” Charya explains. The company’s flagship platform LetsCareerUp aims to bring students, parents and schools together to enable better career decisions.

Hiring better For the longest time, in spite of recruitment consultants and other services that have emerged to ‘add value’ to the country’s recruiters across sectors, nothing beats tangible outcomes. HackerRank, for example, has a network of nearly a million programmers that actively participates in ‘coding sprints’ and ‘hackathons’. For HR professionals and hiring managers, especially senior engineers in sectors like IT, tools built on top of the base platform make up ‘HackerRank for Work’.

“Initially, our business model was built to generate revenues out of our coding contests. But now with HackerRank for Work, we are helping recruiters gain an edge in hiring technical talent,” says Harishankaran K, Co-founder and CTO of HackerRank.

HankerRank brings together a community of programmers that is at play in a competitive environment. Its coding contests even cover niche topics like artificial intelligence.

“There is a lot of technical talent in India but companies still struggle to identify the absolute best among them. A wrong hire costs a lot. What we’ve done is changed the traditional way of shortlisting candidates based on claims in CVs. Companies are now able to hire programmers based on their actual coding abilities,” Harishankaran adds. The HackerRank platform reportedly saves recruiters 75 per cent of total time spent on recruitment.

Both LetsCorp and HackerRank kicked off operations in 2011. Although they haven’t broken even just yet, both businesses are anchored by technologically sound indigenous platforms that add bite to their game. The key to strengthening ecosystems lies in multiple stakeholders taking on a facet of the environment that requires reinvention.