Flipkart, InMobi, Housing love this one-year-old talent finder who devoured a rival

There’s a lot of tech talent available in India. Engineering colleges are spewing out millions of graduates and millions more are plodding away at boring desk jobs at the behemoths of the IT service industry. Yet, hiring tech talent in India is tough.

To sift through the masses and find the right candidate with the right skills for a specific tech role is a perplexing problem most startups face. That’s what TalentPad attempts to solve. It runs an online marketplace of techies, where each candidate is screened for recruiters.

The one-year-old startup already has a star-studded roster of clients, including FlipKart, InMobi, Housing, and Zomato. To boost its tech mettle in assessing candidates, TalentPad has acquired its rival OptimizedBits, it announced today.

“The combined expertise of our curated platform for technology talent, with that of OptimizedBits, will create a data-driven market to make tech hiring efficient.” Mayank Jain, CEO and co-founder of TalentPad says.

The move is more of an acqui-hire as the entire team of OptimizedBits, including the bunch of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati and Kanpur alumni who founded the company, will now move to TalentPad. OptimizedBits too has an impressive clientele of fast-growing startups, including Knowlarity, PropTiger, and Sumologic.

TalentPad raised its first round of institutional funding from Helion Advisors last year.

On TalentPad, companies get to access a pool of 100 pre-screened candidates every month. While its services are free for job-seekers, it charges employers a percentage of the gross salary for every candidate hired.

According to a company announcement, it is currently clocking a revenue run rate of close to US$1 million, experiencing growth of more than 50 percent month-on-month for last six months.