Startup story- Exotel (cloud telephony firm)

In 2011, when Vijay Sharma headed marketing in doctor appointment booking platform Practo, he was given an assignment to hire people. The chemistry post-graduate from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science did an earnest job. He trolled social media profiles of potential hires. He scanned not just the big three social media- LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter- but other social communities like Quora, Angellist, Github, Dribble, Foursquare and Instagram. He made cold calls based on candidates’ profile. Soon he was sitting on a powerhouse of candidate data on an Excel sheet. And using that data, he hired 50 people for Practo for marketing, engineering and technical roles. But he didn’t stay in Practo long. Within six months of joining the company, a desire to start a venture of his own pushed him to co-found cloud telephony firm Exotel. As a co-founder, he had to wear many hats and recruitment was one of major ones. But the excitement of Exotel started wearing away by the third year. “I switched off. I used to tweet, and put up Facebook posts at least twice or thrice a day. But that drastically reduced,” he says. Sharma’s mother, who follows him on twitter, realized something was amiss. One day, in 2014, she told him: “I know you will end up doing something stupid. But if you really want to do something good, do it where your heart and passion lie.” That was a turning point. He decided to start a venture in recruitment solutions, one that would enable companies to hire by analysis a candidate’s profile on social media platforms and other public sources using data science and predictive analytics.

He roped in his BITSian junior of four years, Sudheendra Chippagari, who in turn brought with him two other BITSians, Saiteja Veera and Rishabh Kaul. “It was a BITSian mafia of sorts. In fact, 30 out of the 70 employees are from BITS Pilani,” Sharma laughs. They called their venture Belong. “It was clearly my calling. I realized being an entrepreneur today is relatively risk-free. You will find other entrepreneurs wanting to hire you in case you don’t make it. The experience is invaluable. Besides, I thought persistence always pays,” Sharma says. By the middle of 2014, Belong has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners India. The venture also has high profile investors like Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Blume Ventures, redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama, and Sierra Atlantic founder Raju Reddy. Belong’s clients include Ola, Practo, and Snapdeal, for who it has hired over 130 people in the past few months with an average salary of Rs 24 lakh.

“In one case, our algorithm identified a candidate for a company and it turned out that the candidate had on social media pointed out a technical flaw in a product developed by that same company. The company promptly hired him,” says Sharma. He said his objective is to make the recruitment engine mimic the human mind, and support it with data.