Srikanth
Brief introduction about Bipul Vaibhav
At Skillate, Bipul is responsible for AI, Investment, and overall business growth of Skillate.
Prior to founding Skillate, Bipul worked as a Data Scientist at DataWeave Software Pvt Ltd, where he developed a machine learning model to classify the product categories of e-commerce products. He also worked as an advanced software engineer with Burning Glass Technologies for a little less than a year.
Bipul holds a B. Tech degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from IIT Guwahati. He has co-authored a paper on an autonomous river cleaning robot and a model for video classification using semantic keywords.
He holds the research publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence at International Forums like SPIE and IEEE.
Bipul is passionate about Cricket, Reading books, and Building software products.
Journey behind getting this idea
In January 2015, Bipul was working for an analytics software company in Chennai. Unhappy with his role, Bipul contacted various organizations with openings, but to no avail. The frustrating part was not that he was getting rejected, but that often, he would simply not receive any response from the recruiters. He had no clarity on what stage was his applications getting rejected, or even if they were noticed at all!
This got Bipul thinking about the lack of transparency prevalent in the recruitment process. He realized that even though candidates desperately want a response from the company on the stature of their candidature, large corporations often don’t have the time and bandwidth to respond to every candidate at each stage of the hiring process. With corporates receiving millions of applications every year, the unstructured hiring process not only keeps the candidates in the dark but also deprives organizations of the best talents.
This led Bipul with his co-founders – Sambhav and Anand to form Skillate, an AI-based platform that makes recruitment Easy, Fast, and Transparent with its cutting edge technology.
What is Skillate about ?
Skillate is an advanced decision-making engine to make hiring easy, fast, and transparent.
The AI-based platform helps in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment, beginning from creating the job requisition, to resume matching, to candidate engagement.
Benefits with AI recruitment platform
Working with Skillate, our clients have achieved the following benefits:
- Reducing hiring time by 65%
- Cost per hire by more than 30%
- 40% Lesser Interviews
- 2.2x conversions
Will “AI is replacing human jobs” ?
I actually think AI is empowering humans! AI is never going to replace humans, it is simply enabling them to make better decisions by using the power of data. If at all, AI is automating mundane, repetitive tasks and solving the problem if underemployment.
USP of Skillate
Here are some of our USPs:
- Our AI-based solutions ‘self-learn’ and provide improved results over time
- Skillate is secured and is working with some of the biggest enterprises across sectors
- Skillate integrates with existing Application Tracking Softwares (ATSs) like Sucessfactor and Taleo to help organizations with a smooth transition
- Skillate works efficiently at scale and the platform processes 5 Lakh resume screening in 4 seconds
- Official partner of SAP
Early days struggle
Recruitment as an industry still plays by the old rules. Convincing team heads that technology can make their work easier and more efficient was a challenge. Even after our solutions’ convinced them, adoption in the company remained an issue.
Our dashboard’s highly intuitive design, along with our committed customer success team, ensured that adopting the Skillate platform was a smooth process with little training to the recruitment team.
In the beginning, we targeted recruitment consultancies as our primary customer. We thought since we are making their jobs easier, adoption won’t be an issue. Unfortunately, we couldn’t deliver the message across correctly, and the agencies thought of us as potential competition. These consultancies also had budget issues that hampered their adoption of a new product. After much ado, we started focusing on enterprises as our target customers, which turned out to be a game-changer.
Funding details
1M in October 2019 as Pre Series-A funding.
Customers Portfolio
15+ Enterprises as customers including the likes of Yes Bank, OYO, Saint-Gobain, L&T Financial Services, Software AG, RBL Bank, Liberty Insurance, Bigbasket, etc.
Future plans
International expansion is one of our key focus areas, especially in the US. As we expand, we are making our product multi-lingual and more scalable so that it can handle even more volume.
