<div><table align="left" border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="1" style="width: 200px"><tbody><tr><td><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/Lalit-Bhagia.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 216px;"></td></tr><tr><td>Lalit Bhagia</td></tr></tbody></table>Myrefers is a referral based marketplace for jobs powered by social media intelligence and big data. This was funded (Pre-Series A) by Bedrock Ventures and touched a break even few months earlier. </div><div><br>Speaking to <em>BW Businessworld's</em> <strong>Manish Kumar Pathak</strong>, Lalit Bhagia, Founder and CEO, Myrefers, discusses the uniqueness of this model and how useful this set-up is for the marketplace.</div><div> </div><div><strong>The introduction of the company (www.myrefers.com), says data intelligence. What exactly is data intelligence and how is it used?</strong></div><div>Data Intelligence is the core of www.myrefers.com, one of India's leading referral based marketplaces for jobs. Our unique big data engine lets our referrer networks identify the best fit for a particular job available on the platform, ranks applications based on skill and culture match, leading to formation of a trust circle that further combines with user intelligence. The data intelligence is also not just limited to the data on myrefers platform but also gathers data from the open web, from all other online social mediums an individual is connected with. That is what makes the platform so unique.<br><br>The resume is what you want others or rather hirers to perceive about you, but all online information about you blends with what you really are, hence the ability to rank and match people to jobs becomes much trustworthy than any other platforms in the world and this means quality data for recruiters.</div><div> </div><div><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/algorithm.jpg" style="width: 589px; height: 380px;"><br> </div><div><strong>What convinced you that this model will be successful?</strong></div><div>There are explicit business reasons to believe this model is already doing well elsewhere in the world. In India, you may find more players joining the bandwagon. Today 70 per cent of all company hiring takes place through employee referrals and HR Consultants. These are not only two of the biggest sources of hire, but also the sources of hire that gives best quality i.e. less number of resumes further leading to large number of closures. We realized two very important opportunities: <br> </div><div>A) To extend referrals to external world as we use them in everyday life<br> </div><div>B) The ability to organize and help facilitate the highly unorganised HR consulting market<br> </div><div>Myrefers is a force multiplier, the above is already taking place, and we are enabling structuring and collaboration integrating it with elements of social big data intelligence. The results are qualitative candidatures, passive reach through a faster seamless process. <br> </div><div>They say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. One of our clients Umang Kumar, President, Cardekho shared his feedback that our platform (www.myrefers.com) is helping them for product and tech hires as the referral model is ensuring the referrers are disincentivized to send them junk profiles. This evidently saves his team good amount of time spent in scanning irrelevant profiles. The curated marketplace model also allows the platform to rapidly scale hiring capacity for Cardekho as and when they need. Cardekho closed nearly 40 per cent of their tech hires last quarter through Myrefers. <br> </div><div><strong>What is the technique of Myrefers?</strong></div><div>Myrefers works just like any other marketplace, a commodity is replaced with a candidate, companies seeking hires form the buyers and they get to pay Myrefers on closures only. Then there the vast pool of sellers or resellers typical in a marketplace, at Myrefers sellers comes from the entire referral network available on the platform. It is made up of individuals referring friends via their social connections, email connections and phonebook, HR consultants referring candidates from their databases and freelancing recruiters referring people from their personal connections that form the sellers network. </div><div> </div><div>We are trying to incentivize quality leads or referrals through two kind of rewards posted against each job on the platform: an intro reward and a refer reward. Every time a relevant reference takes place, the referee is rewarded and every time a refer gets hired referees make a bigger reward. We share a large part of the rewards companies put on the platform with our referral network and keep a small commission as platform fee.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Are there any competitions around, if yes then how do you plan to evolve?</strong></div><div>At one end every business in the recruitment space is a competition, but honestly no-one is similar to us in our approach. Our unique approach of curating jobs and profiles blending it with social big data intelligence allows us a distinctive position and is a big game changer. </div><div> </div><div><strong>How is a network built, considering that many people seeking jobs share common interests?</strong></div><div>We are not really building new networks. We are focusing on existing networks of people on our platform which may or may not be online. Current online network is what we call as the primary network and the current offline network is the secondary network. Because only when a refer X happens from a user Y's current networks whether offline or online, the inbuilt myrefers algorithms and inevitably the recruiter comes to know of X too. For instance, our platform encourages and prompts every user to bring in their email and LinkedIn networks when they enter or register on the platform, this where they bring their primary network. We further help them make referrals from even a secondary network that our sophisticated algorithms backed by data sciences bring forth. The secondary network is a comprehensive and may sometimes be overlapping connections that come from people belonging to same campus / alumnus or workplaces, hereby helping tap into a much wider web of secondary known network. </div><div> </div><div><strong>How are you different from job portals available out there?</strong></div><div>www.myrefers.com is a curated marketplace while the job boards are classifieds businesses. The big difference is that we deliver a very select and highly organized list of 8-10 profiles instead of 100s of junk, uninterested and irrelevant profiles that job boards usually do. People referrals and our big data algorithms are making this possible; our growing client list is also an authentic indication of the success the concept has delivered. Along with providing high quality matches, we also facilitate our client companies to access a wide target of passive candidates who are connected with the referees or users on our platform. (78 per cent of jobseekers are passive) .The job boards only give recruiters active profiles (not more than 5-6 per cent of job seekers). This also is a reflection on the revenue size of this industry where job boards are making only 8-10 per cent of the overall recruiting industry revenues, while the consultants get the remaining 90 per cent of the pie. With our model we are taking away a large pie of all of these current sources very openly i.e. bringing in transparency and accountability. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Are you mentoring startups on best way to hire? What can you say about startups hiring, is it different from hiring for established or well run companies.</strong></div><div>Yes, startup hiring is very different. There is no doubt that startup recruiting is hard. And time and time again, the #1 challenge that most startup founders speak about is recruiting right set of people. It's not raising money, closing deals, doing sales, finding partners. It's hiring people. I bet if you polled a bunch of startup founders the data would be very conclusive.</div><div> </div><div>Their business needs grow fast. Best suited people hiring is the most important aspect in helping them scale their businesses quickly. They look for trustworthy source of hiring that provides faster results. MyRefers therefore works really well for them. One can only imagine the enormity and abundance of the networks open for exploration. Referrals are backed by trust, hence for a startup it is all the more important that they get trustworthy employees while they hit the ground running. </div><div> </div><div>However this also means startup CEOS need to be very clear about what they expect and wish to offer to potential employees. Given that we work with so many startups, we talk to the CEOs and founding teams very often, continuously storing their feedbacks and putting them into action to improve various aspects of the recruiting method. We tell them when is the ideal time to hire for their startup, when a need to invest a significant amount of time on it. I'm speaking directly to founders and not delegating the task. It is super critical</div><div> </div><div>We are also helping them create strong employer brands through our proprietary on- ground employee outreach program 'startup mashups' (hiring in office campuses via coding challenges where we create a large amount of buzz for startups working with us), giving them detailed inputs on hiring process, persuading them to writing blogs to attract talent, doing HR workshops, ways to interview, refining offer letter process, forming an employee friendly culture and so on. </div><div> </div><div>We are in it together, I tell my startup clients. </div><div> </div>
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