E-Paper
Startup Mantra: Simplifying tech recruitment process
Akash Bhadange and Yogini Bende founded Peerlist, a professional network with verified work profiles, to address problems faced by companies when hiring, such as inefficiencies and incorrect information in resumes. Peerlist also aims to make it easier for candidates to showcase their work profiles and for recruiters to discover and interpret them. The company recently raised ?9 crore ($1.2 million) in funding and plans to monetize with company profiles and job listings, as well as showcase the best five profiles or users with the help of artificial intelligence. A mobile app is also in the works.
Companies face several challenges when it comes to hiring. This not only leads to inefficiencies but also results in a significant waste of time and resources. Another issue that companies face is incorrect or misleading information in their resumes. The repercussions of such a misalignment can be detrimental to productivity, team dynamics, and overall organisational success. From a candidate’s perspective information on their work profiles and resumes is disorganised, hard to spot, and spread across the internet. This makes it difficult for their peers and recruiters to discover and interpret them. Sensing this gap in the market, Akash Bhadange and Yogini Bende, founded Peerlist in August 2021, a professional network with robust and verified work profiles.
Resume builder
Coming from Akola, a tier-3 small town in Maharashtra, Yogini landed in Pune in August 2017. She met Akash online while working on a project and the duo started working together.
Says Yogini, “We both were working remotely and I thought there would be better job opportunities in Pune. Before relocating, I had got a job in service-based startups where I got the understanding of how this new world works and got good experience of how to build things from scratch and to work in the company environment.”
Akash recalls, “After Yogini relocated to Pune, we got married in March 2018. I am a designer by profession and pursuing this field after completing my electronics engineering from MIT College in Pune. After marriage, we were thinking of doing something on our own. Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown provided us with the opportunity to explore certain things. Yogini had started a side project as a resume builder. It was a simple drag-and-drop feature to show everything under one single profile.”
Building in public
“I had no idea about product design and all and I used to show to Akash who would suggest some changes in the product design aspect. Soon the product started evolving,” said Yogini.
Akash said, “Since I was a product designer, I had the habit of taking feedback from 500 people, we did the same with our resume builder project. We created a prototype and got a good response. People said we would like to have something like this which further boosted our confidence.”
Akash and Yogini launched a simple beta product on August 5, 2021. Akash stated, “We were aware that we had a very popular professional networking platform in front of us as a competitor. However, that platform has not evolved much in recent years. We thought we can add some features which are missing in that platform to our project. It was this simple problem statement for us. It resonated with a lot of people who started requesting features which were not available elsewhere.”
Beta launch and funding
Akash said, “We both were in full-time jobs working from home when the beta version was launched. We were happy with our job as well as this project. In September 2021, Vishwesh Jirgale, founder of Sifar Ventures and head of engineering at ModernLoop, messaged us on Twitter asking to send an invite to create his profile. We got on a call and Vishwesh, along with Akshay Deo, cofounder of Sifar Ventures and Head of Engineering and Product – Importers at Postman, offered to invest ₹20 lakh.”
“Vishwesh and Akshay were happy that we were building something from Pune. They both had a strong conviction before investing in us. It also happened that we found out some common connections with Vishwesh through our design and developer communities,” Akash added.
“They both gave us confidence and told us to focus more on the product and give more time to it. Since we were working jobs, it meant we had to leave our jobs. We never had any doubt about our product but it was not an easy decision to make. Married co-founders have their own set of problems. We did some risk mitigation and sorted out our personal finances and runway. Yogini resigned on October 14, 2021, and we got our first cheque of investment from Sifar,” recalled Akash.
Investor experience
Says Akash, “We focussed on building our product for the entire year 2022. We went from 3,000 users to 23,000 users, all word of mouth and organic growth.”
Yogini said, “We had launched Peerlist on Product Hunt. Investors started noticing it. Dharmesh Shah, cofounder and CTO at HubSpot reached out to us. We also had written blogs about us, our journey and why we were building Peerlist etc. Dharmesh had done his prior research and created a profile on Peerlist too. Akash and Dharmesh connected over a call and during the discussion, Akash mentioned our willingness to raise another round of ₹8 crore ( ₹ 1.5 crore for angel investors and ₹ 6.5 crore for institutional investors). Akash had asked him to review our deck and he agreed. Dharmesh then emailed us and asked us to pencil down his investment of ₹1.5 crore. We later got to know that Dharmesh usually does not invest in early-stage startups and in those who pitch for investment. He prefers to do his own research and then send out offers to founders.”
“Dharmesh was in constant communication with us. He would pose all kinds of questions to us including our go-to-market strategy from 10,000 users to 1 million users, what technologies are we using to build the product, our decision-making process, etc. This helped us because Dharmesh got more conviction in us and our product during this period. While we were waiting for a response from certain institutional investors, Dharmesh offered to invest the entire amount ₹ 8 crore and asked us to speed up the product development process,” stated Yogini.
“Our previous managers had also committed to us and hence we had to increase the round size to ₹9 crore. All of this was based on trust,” Yogini added.
Quick onboarding
“At present, we are focussing only on tech companies and startups. Since we belong to tech, we can understand the problems of tech companies and candidates better. Rather than solving for everybody and for people whom we cannot relate their problems to, it is better to solve only for the tech community including product managers, developers, designers, founders, and investors,” Akash added.
Work experience verification
Peerlist has now introduced a feature for verifying a candidate’s work experience. Explaining this further Akash said, “Initially we thought we are adding just another feature not present in LinkedIn. As we delved deep into this, we realised there are a lot more issues in the hiring process including the proof of work (verification) and thought of how to shorten this hiring cycle. When a candidate submits his or her work email, it is verified through our database. We identify authentic email addresses or aliases of companies and send a password to that email address. Once the candidate receives the password, his work experience gets verified. At present, we can verify only current working email addresses, but we are in the process of launching a past work verification feature too. We have also introduced a student education verification feature.”
Yogini says, “A recruiter on average spends only six seconds to scan one resume. We thought from a candidate’s perspective about creating the best pitch for them. Every candidate can then have their best shot. We built the product by keeping the candidate as our hero. After solving most of their problems, we are now thinking from the founders’ or company’s perspective. Founders were looking at Peerlist to help them hire people within a shortened time span. We realised this is also an opportunity to monetise and hence we introduced Peerlist job listings, company profiles, etc.”
Roadmap ahead
Sharing their plans for the near future, Akash and Yogini said, “We are now completely focussing on company profiles to enable companies to easily post jobs; and on the other side, make it easy for the candidates to search for jobs. With artificial intelligence (AI) emerging, a lot of things would become easy. Our goal is to showcase the best five profiles or users which will help us monetise the platform.”
“At present, we are in the beta stage and hence company profiles and all offerings are available free of cost to any user. Within six months we will start monetising. We want to be prepared when the market is ready and normalised,” the duo said adding further that a mobile app of Peerlist will be launched soon.
