One of the biggest recruiters in India, the IT industry is estimated to do over 10 million candidate assessments every year. In many companies, hiring is a year-long process with over a lakh technical assessments done in a year. How do you reduce the time taken to do assessments and how do you reduce bias?
These are the two spots that Igauge, a new community marketplace powered by Artificial Intelligence, hopes to catch. What it does is bring together hundreds of qualified evaluators who are well versed in technical skills like Android, Java, Python etc, on its platform. All a company has to do is to upload profiles. An ID number is assigned to the candidate and an ID to the assessor. Once the CV is scanned, a candidate interview happens through the platform — neither the assessor nor the candidate knows each other’s identity. During the interview, technical skills, process orientation and communication abilities are gauged. The company gets the feedback instantaneously.
“We work like an Uber for the talent acquisition industry,” says Udayaraj Punnorth, CEO of Igauge, describing how over a thousand qualified evaluators are already on the platform. It’s Igauge’s responsibility to maintain a quality check on evaluators.
A dashboard is maintained that tells a company how many assessments are done, how many pending, and how much money and manpower it has saved!
So far 14 companies are availing Igauge’s services. Thirteen are in contract negotiation stage.
For the evaluators, this is like a freelance assignment that they can do when free. Just like Uber, profiles are assigned automatically to evaluators. Once the assignment is completed and the company pays igauge, the money is credited to the evaluator’s account. “It’s a fee per assessment and instant money,” says Punnorth.