//

Photo credit: jager / 123RF.

You’ve gone and done it – after days of searching fruitlessly through internet job posting hell, you find that perfect job with the perfect description. This was made for you (or you were made for it – who knows? Who cares?). You’re ready to submit your profile and your perfectly handcrafted cover letter.

And that’s when you see it – the pail of water to your fire, the sea otter that’ll eat the oyster that was about to be your world: “Apply on company website”.

You really want this job. More specifically, your bank account needs this job. You click through and ready yourself for the struggle to come, including but not limited to: inputting your resume into an outdated and slow system that inevitably won’t read your file type, retyping your last seven years of work experience after you submit said resume, and intermittent system crashes – where you get to redo everything over again.

If you think that’s time-consuming for you, you’re not the only one. Hiring is a lengthy process on the side of the company’s human resources team as well. Chances are, even after you jump through those hoops to submit your information, they’re still left with a gap to fill, even if they get a sense of who you are through an interview.

“If a company needs to hire one person, they will have to – if they need to use tech – will need to use multiple systems: one to manage applications, one to do applications, one to do an interview, another to assess,” says Pragnya Srivastava, co-founder of FlatPi, a hiring software startup. Things get even more complicated when the person going through the applications isn’t necessarily that well-versed in hiring themselves.

The Mumbai-based company wants to fix this problem on both sides by bringing a little bit of artificial intelligence (AI) to the hiring process.

See: Need an engineer? Meet the Indian startup that’ll hire one for you

Beyond the resume

Before job seekers submit their applications, a job poster using FlatPi can add weights to different requirements of the job – such as language skills and Java proficiency – based on how important they are. When the parameters are set, submitted applications will be evaluated and weighted on that criteria. Then, the software will assemble a list of possible candidates for the job, ranked by how well they fit the skill set required for the job posting.

We have hired, and we have gotten hired as well.

The system can be programmed with different weighted criteria for each step of the job process, and the list will be shuffled accordingly.

What FlatPi is working on now is factoring personality and emotion into the candidate. The system can build a picture of personality by analyzing candidates’ social media profiles, email accounts, and other avenues to help the system analyze a job seeker’s emotional intelligence, or emotional quotient.

See: LinkedIn too frustrating? These startups help Indians get jobs

Building within the job search desert

Pragnya Srivastava, co-founder of FlatPi.

Pragnya, along with co-founders Devvrat Arya and Pritam Roy, launched the startup in response to seeing graduates having trouble finding jobs. FlatPi helps quicken and ease the hiring process while making the process more transparent on both sides.

“We have hired, and we have gotten hired as well,” Pragnya tells *Tech in Asia*. That was enough to give the team an idea of what needed to change. “What you think as a user and what you think when inside the company is completely different.”

“When you venture – especially using technology, especially into an industry which is completely tech-starved – there is obviously [a] need,” she explains.

FlatPi’s pricing varies between companies and is based on factors like business size and quantity of recruitment. Prices can start at US$730 per quarter and can go up to US$30,000 per year. The startup’s team of 13 currently serves 10 to 15 companies in industries ranging from banking and finance to IT.

There’s plenty of room for help in India’s hiring space. HiringMonk finds and curates job candidates, while Xobin is a hiring portal specifically for engineers. Assessment and hiring startup CoCubes announced its acquisition by Aon Hewitt earlier this month. Job search platform Hiree realigned under Quikr’s umbrella in July.

Backed by a number of angel investors, FlatPi raised its seed round in November last year.

Converted from Indian rupees. US$1 = INR 68.65

This post http://ift.tt/2gICowy appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Startups – Tech in Asia http://ift.tt/2gICowy