Universalhunt aims to be a holistic platform for professional engagement

Every industry, company or an individual has unique talent needs. Now, there exists a gross mismatch on demand and supply of professional talent and opportunities, which creates inefficiencies in the ecosystem. Universalhunt.com, the online venture of the Universal Hunt Group, aims to bridge the gap by creating a common platform where individuals and companies from all over the world can create a trusted community. Founder of Universalhunt.com, Harshit Bhavasar speaks about the platform and how they have managed to create a network where people can not only connect but also avail of the expertise that each individual has to offer. What is the story behind settling down with offering a professional engagement platform? How does it work? Since almost a decade now we have been in the business of identifying opportunities (with companies in the form of suitable job openings) and talent fitting those opportunities. We started this business from India, matching (job) opportunities with talent (people skills). We expanded by going global and now have over 6000 clients across 80 plus countries for which we search talent from all over the world with a record of placing people of multiple nationalities across industries and sectors. We wanted to increase this scale and go beyond job opportunities to help people professionally. Universalhunt.com is a global professional networking cum career platform where people can register their profile and network with other professionals to find jobs and business opportunities, or even buy, sell or showcase their products and services, and also organise or participate in events, share knowledge and more. How big is your team? How do you sustain this business model? Our total team size is around 350 persons for all businesses and products combined. We have divided each service and product into a separate brand or company. We have strong offline model to support, supplement, complement and sustain our online services. Each business we get in to is not only complementary to each other but also independent in terms of revenues and profitability and has a standalone team to drive them with spirit of startups and advantage of an established brand. Are there any specific areas of technology that you keenly invest in? How are you making your services easy to use for the consumer? Our focus is to improve the search algorithm so that members get the immediate benefit of converting profiles into profitable business. Our focus on search algorithms in each section like people search, job search, event search, article search and product/service search allows users to find the most desired fit within that section. With all the information available in the profile of every individual, we try to link the search with profile details like interest, skills, experience, network, past choices, activities and other information available. We are running our offerings on browsers as well as an app for all sections. Could you share details about the funding raised till now? What do you foresee in terms of funding for the future? Universalhunt.com is a venture of Universal Hunt Pvt. Ltd. which is in existence since 2007 and is self-funded. It will continue to be funded by the same route in the future too. What are your growth plans and roadmap for the near future? Some of our immediate action plans include making each section of Universalhunt.com more independent and enhance their depth in terms of usability. We also wish to put 100 percent of the features on our app. Our focus is on developing tools which will enhance engagement amongst members. We also aim to increase the user base to 100 million in 2 years. What sets you apart from other similar offerings? LinkedIn, for instance. We are more than a professional networking and career portal. We are a comprehensive business portal where every professional can be a buyer or seller or demonstrator of his products and services – and not just skills. We want to take a professional beyond his skills to direct commercial benefit via the service or product that he can offer. We don’t just connect but we create a marketplace around every profile. Beyond connections member can upload products and services, advertise on Universalhunt.com network as well as on different networking websites and start generating business leads. Member can add their travel plans and start receiving meeting requests. Member can organise events and get attendees within the Universalhunt network. Our core focus is profiling. It’s more detailed from point of job seekers and also has more features to upload videos, photographs etc. The job search functionality that we offer is more advanced and detailed with features like “available for interview”, “immediately available” allowing companies to have more refined search of candidates immediately available to join as well as for interview to speed up the selection process. The Events section on the platform allows members to showcase upcoming events, invite members for participation and allows them to understand the participating audience before the event. We will also take this to the next level of buying and selling of event tickets. How do you plan to widen your reach? We want to right now only focus on features and make them so beneficial that the product will automatically become viral and spread purely by word of mouth. We want to invest every penny on feature enhancements for user simplification. What are the key company milestones for the next 6-12 months that need to be achieved? We are working aggressively on putting all features on the app and developing an e-wallet to take functionality beyond showcasing of products and services and allow actual transactions.