From zero to hire in 10 days, here’s how this startup is radically improving recruitment

Hiring is often a sign that good things are happening in a startup, whether it be that they just received funding, or have just gotten the go-ahead to expand their operations. On the other hand, it is also a very tiresome and excruciating process to undergo. An index created by University of Chicago economist Steven Davis revealed that US employers spend 25 working days on average to fill a position. That is essentially a month of under-productivity, and can cause a startup’s progress to sag in the meantime.

That’s not all. According to Tushar Tejuja, who has hired over a hundred people across several multinational corporations in different countries throughout his career, the recruitment landscape is chock full of problems:

Firstly, candidate resumés look so similar, which makes it tough to distinguish actual skills, leading to false positives and false negatives. Secondly, it can be a very expensive process for employers who end up hiring a recruitment agency and paying them a fee of 15 to 25 percent of the hired employee’s annual salary. Thirdly, the entire recruitment process lacks transparency and engagement for the candidate and the employer, making it a ‘hit or miss’ for both.

Having faced this problem for years, Tejuja eventually decided that enough was enough. Like many before him, he turned to technology to solve the problem of effectively sourcing and assessing talent – and so HackerTrail was born.

“We believe that one of the most critical challenges in the recruitment process today is the ability to match the right candidates to the right job,” he emphasizes. “At present, there is a fair bit of ‘noise’ in this area that ultimately impacts business productivity. In order to alleviate this noise, our focus has been on sourcing and selection of the right candidates.”

Putting the fun in hiring

HackerTrail is by no means the only recruitment-based startup out there. Locally, startups such as Glints and Ideatory are working hard to solve this issue as well. However, Tejuja says that they have set themselves apart from the rest with an emphasis on gamification in their recruitment process.

Here’s how it works. The HackerTrail team works with clients to translate the typical dry job descriptions into custom, gamified challenges, and candidates are then invited via social media to complete them. By reviewing the challenge outcomes, Tejuja claims that employers will be able to narrow down the right candidates and eventually find that perfect one.

Tejuja calls it a “win-win situation for both employers and candidates”, largely because gamification attracts more candidates to take up the challenges, as opposed to legacy job descriptions. “We focus a lot on the ‘Gen Y’ mindset. If you want more millennials to join your company, you need to get into their heads and see what excites them,” he emphasizes. “You need to find a way to get them interested.”

Here’s a peek at a recent campaign that HackerTrail created for the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), in which they gave away a MacBook Air to the winner:

“The 15 to 20 percent fee that our clients save on recruitment usually goes into prizes that further entice candidates to give the challenges a shot,” Tejuja reveals with a smile.

From zero to hire in 10 days

Creating a self-serve platform