Bangalore-based startup Belong helps with data driven hiring, skill mapping

With Big Data entering the hiring sector, there are startups helping with utilising the data to get the right employee for a company. One such startup is Bangalore-based  Belong that curates data from all over the Internet including social media profiles, blogs, professional platforms and so on to understand an employee’s profile. It then uses the right algorithms and analytics to identify the best fit for a particular job description. Belong already has over 70 paying customers, who are using Belong to hire mid to senior roles talent.

“A lot of behind the scenes insights power these relevant algorithms, which help in the prioritisation such as common interests of the team, past hiring trends of the company, industry shifts and a host of other factors. The platform then helps recruiters engage their talent pool through persuasive candidate experiences that are personalised and delivered at scale. Today, most of the major internet and e-commerce companies are using Belong, along with an increasing number of large enterprise product companies as well as companies in growth sectors like analytics,” co-founder Vijay Sharma tells tech2.

Belong was founded by Vijay Sharma, Sudheendra Chilappagari, Saiteja Veera and Rishabh Kaul in 2014. Sharma has worked as the marketing head in building Practo as well Exotel, where he spent substantial amount of time hiring candidates. It was during this that he understood the pain points of finding the right candidate, and eventually teamed up with Chilappagari, and the others to form Belong.

“The HR team in an organisation loses precious recruiting hours every day screening and interviewing applicants who are either not committed or simply don’t make the cut for the role. Belong helps recruiters reach out exactly to the people they would like to hire,” explains Sharma.

He adds that inbound recruitment like Naukri and Hiree offer access to limited talent pool. Traditional recruiting sources rely on outdated resume-based processes and targets mere 25 percent of the total talent pool. On the other hand, data-driven outbound recruiting platforms bring to companies access to both passive and active talent by aggregating candidate data from hundreds of public and social sources, he claims. So, Belong is data driven hiring and skill mapping SaaS tool that automates the hiring of a candidate. Sharma says that the company plans to target all enterprise and computer software companies which are setting up global talent centers. Last year, Belong received Series A funding led by Matrix Partners India, Blume Ventures, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and other strategic angels. It is an SaaS platform and clients are charged on a subscription model. So, a company is charged on a yearly basis, depending upon the number of users who then chose to use the product or service. The cost of the services may vary depending upon the customers and it starts at $15,000 and can go up to $100,000.