HRchat Interview with Vinay Johar: Recruitment Tech: Resume Parsing and Enrichment

Bill Batham: Welcome to the HR Chat Podcast. Bringing the best of the HR and talent communities to you.

Bill Batham: Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. I'm your host today, Bill Batham. And in this HR Chat, we're going to hear from Vinay Johar, CEO at RChilli, a tool for providing passing, matching and enrichment to every recruitment management system, making sure that resume data is captured, managed and analyzed in proficient ways. Jarr is a serial entrepreneur. Before RChilly, he ran a consultancy called E-consul Infotech, which focused on product development and outsourcing. Typically, RChilly's clients are ATSs, job boards and enterprises that require the ability to pass large amounts of resumes or jobs in a scalable manner. They need automated onboarding of candidates and smarter matching and scoring systems to stay competitive in their marketplaces. So if you're looking for new tools and tactics to help you screen and engage the best candidates, keep listening to today's show. Let's start by you telling the listeners a little bit about yourself. Tell them about your career background. As I mentioned there in the intro, you're a serial entrepreneur. You've got a very interesting background. So let's start there up to the point of view, of founding RChilli.

Vinay Johar:: What we people see RChilly right now, RChilly, which is passing, matching and enrichment. And it is available like we have a customer base in 34 countries. At my, they call Journey started way back 2004, almost 16, 17 years back, where I started my first entrepreneur journey. And honestly, it's a public domain information I failed pathetically. I rebuild business. I gone to my B school, learn it out, what is entrepreneur's ship is, what is all businesses are there. The second business, what you referred, econiser, we build it out and that was a good success. We take an exit way back 2010. And then that's where we started RChilly. And Journey is so far is almost 10, 11 years. Awesome journey. We work with the right from startups to fortune companies across the globe. Almost all four continents except in Trattika for obvious reasons, but that's what we are today. Another small journey I can share with you.

Bill Batham: Okay. Thank you very much. Let's get into the mission of RChilli. Share that with us and how it helps HR pros and leaders.

Vinay Johar: My personal mission is with my mentors and even when I speak is more to touch 7 billion souls on this earth. And I use an, I use on a path of this technology where I can make a small contribution to a candidate to get him a right job. It's where he can go and feel satisfied or as an organization, they should be able to quickly select the right candidate. And that's whole mission, which I am like, if I can make an impact to their career selection and in a right way. And that is where RChilli is working today. So I'm so happy like Journey is pretty, pretty almost 10 years, but today we are processing almost around 2.5 billion unique profiles on my platform. And that we are going like crazy right now.

Bill Batham: Okay. So you're going like crazy right now. It makes sense. It's been a very volatile labor market, of course. But as we record this interview in Q2 of 2021, things are bouncing back in many places, which is great. And in other places, we hope that happens very soon. Well, to me, a bit about what happened to office-based jobs between Q1 of 2020 and now. Explain the roller coaster in the labor market. In January, February of 2020, people were hiring. The conversation was all about employer brand and the war for talent. And then it was a very, very different story from about the middle of March onwards. And it's just being that roller coaster. Tell us all about it.

Vinay Johar: Yes, I agree. When this COVID hit in 2020, especially Q1, end of Q1, or start of Q2 2020, even we got a hit at that time. We were a station where we lost almost 40% of our revenue. Not only revenue customer cancellations and the refunds and all that stuff was going on. One stage, instead of a CEO as a strategy, we were acting like a customer support guy to retain people. But with the help of advisors, with the help of our team, we reputed our technology. We reputed our whole approach to the market. And then we never stopped it. Of course, market improved. Healthcare market picked it up. Education market picked it up. The AT market was going up, and especially the remote workers. And that's a thanks to my team and vision, what my board has put in. We serve almost 36 domains today. And that never let us help us to grow as quickly as possible because of healthcare, because of education, because of this IT segment is going up. Of course, we lost certain businesses in retail, innovation, and those markets. But it never ends. Now, fast forward now, when we've seen that January, February of Q1, mid of Q1, when market was improving, everything was opening. And certainly now we have a second wave going on. And yes, there's a dip in wish list, but now people have learned how to work remotely. And that has changed a lot. Working on office is a different space. Working remotely. And companies have seen that they have, their expenditure has gone down. They can hire people sitting in a remote location. And that has increased overall hiring, if I see in especially in education, healthcare, pharma, and ed tech, these type of industries. These are picking up pretty, pretty fast. I see in the last survey, which was almost around 62% growth is projected in Q2, right on these industries. And that's what we are already there.

Bill Batham: OK, let's backtrack again and go back to early 2020, those dark times when the pandemic really started hitting different places. At that point, as companies were scrambling and trying to understand how they can continue to operate, how was screening candidates complicated? And what are the two or three major things that successful companies have done to ensure that they can continue to screen and then hire, attract, onboard, et cetera, new employees?

Vinay Johar:: Sure. So since we have a product in screening and we closely monitor how people are utilisation is there, what queries are going on. One primary change came in is there's no limit of boundaries. There's no limit of visa requirement, especially if I talk about US market. Earlier, we have a location, we have a visa category and all that stuff. Now people say, you want to hire a skill, let it be anywhere in the world. Of course, certain requirements are based on those stuff. But we've seen there is a 50% shift of queries going on and that has forced us to change our technology so quickly. Suddenly, we are like simple search query, which is in English. I have to process even non-English profiles too. And we have to do it. And that has changed, I don't know, is only we are doing, but everybody is doing. So remote hiring has picked up and that has changed our search queries. That has changed our screening stuff. Second came up, pretty, pretty good task is people want to validate this stuff. If I'm a hiring subperson A and who's sitting in maybe Central America, right? Now I have to screen it. That screening is not only by this, okay, I have a I9 verification done or all that so the verification is done. We do go back to employers or find out their social media footprints, find out what exactly is going on to verify whether this person has a capability to it. Now shift was in person interview to capability interview was a big change that what we have seen in this last almost nine months. Talking about enterprises or companies who have grown, they like technology adoption is pretty high. They want to use technology so that they can quickly scale. Manual scale is not easily that everybody can go and scale very manually, but technology has helped them to scale quickly. And technology has to be more intuitive because candidate doesn't have a time and patience to spend time on their website, look for the right thing and then go for it. And that's the whole change what we've seen in patterning enterprises and people who have adopted technology, we have seen the growth. Maybe I'm not taking names in clients here, but we have seen clients as gone go. Sorry, we have seen that the clients revenue has gone up by almost 300% which is enormous rate and yes, technology has a major role right now because of connections, remote, screen, behavior of search has changed, behavior of candidate has changed, everything has come up in that way. Bill Batham: Okay, let's have a look at one of the technologies that you guys offer, which is your search and match engine and that provides four recommendations, job to resumes, job to jobs, resume to resumes, take 60 seconds now and tell listeners a little bit about each.

Vinay Johar: So these are all the different use cases what we work with. Use cases if I'm talking to a candidate, candidate needs is I give you a profile, you tell me what jobs I should go for. And that is where the resume is to job matching comes up. He does not want to spend time on searching jobs and save way for recruiter, he says, I have a job showing the candidates period. I don't want to go for a keyword search and all that stuff. And second step is which is we added it. Let us say as a recruiter, I love one candidate. I call him and he's not available. Now I don't want to go to my search results because this is the perfect candidate for me. What system tells is, oh, similar candidate available in your database, that is resume to resume. So system goes on, systems build it up and we keep scaling on this.

Bill Batham: Now then as part of my homework, I had a visit today, I was all over the art really website. And you've got a lot of awesome content. Congratulations. You create a lot of interesting videos and I can see that you're involved with loads of different events in the HR space. And in addition to that, you guys are regularly posting new blog posts and press releases. And one that I found particularly interesting was called five modern recruitment trends to adopt. Can you now take a couple of minutes and suggest some recruitment tactics that managers in HR might want to incorporate into their hiring strategies? So for example, targeted recruitment ads, texting and chat bots, resume passing solutions, of course, and maybe gamification.

Vinay Johar: Sure. That's something I call it HR innovation. Startups in this space are coming up with the very innovative approaches to serving three primary things. One is reducing the cost of hiring. Second is outreach to this new generation which is coming up specifically, menalials who are more on Snapchat or Instagram and they have a focus of 20 seconds. Now take example of this target recruiting ad. This is one of my very close friend. He runs his business based on Toronto by Java and X. That's his name. You visited my page. You love this job. You spent 30 seconds on that job and you didn't apply. Can we target those type of people to bring them on the industry? Because millennials, they don't have a time to spend 30 minutes or 10 minutes or even a five minutes on your website. They visited, they loved it, they booked market. Let us track them afterwards. And now industry is people wants communication to their small handset. And that's how these new technologies like parsing technology which can reduce your application process to a few seconds, maybe five or six seconds from 10 minutes. Target recruitment or chat bots, they become interactive. Text messages, applications are going on and we are serving helping those people, those startups in this community and they are maybe next to unicorn. We will see in a short time.

Bill Batham: I would like to ask you now, there has been quite a lot of talk about a huge wave of job movers once the employees feel that the economy is stable again. Certainly this has been a reoccurring theme on the HR chat show for a few months now. We are expecting in certain places such as the US and Canada for example, in Q3 but certainly by Q4 of 2021, all those folks who have been sitting on their highly skilled job and protecting it and saying there is no way that I am going to move, not wild things are so volatile and also because of all the personal things that will be going on in their lives over the course of the crisis. But as folks feel more comfortable with the economy and the labour market and the opportunities open up again, we are all expecting this big move of those highly skilled people. In your opinion, what will that labour movement look like in Q4 of 2021 and into Q1 of 2022?

Vinay Johar: That is a really interesting question. I was with one of the sessions with Josh Bersin when he talked about the same, I was also doing research as a strategy where we want to head towards in this year 2021, 2022. The labour market is moving so volatile just like a stock market. The preferences is changing. Humans want to hire experts and good or bad, I don't know, but experts are available in market. COVID has taken away all this boundaries of this requirement, this requirement, this current but gig hiring has gone like anything. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, I agree. But now excitement is once this government stimulus goes away, once market opens up, people come back to the market, how it works. As a candidate side, as a labour side, they are available, they can do multiple jobs because they have a time to do it because there is nothing outside which is distracting them. Moving forward, when everything opens up, they have a movie, they have an outing going on, they have a regression going on, how they react, will they do two jobs, three jobs? Nobody knows it. Coming back to enterprises side, right now they are hiring cross border because they want to best talent. Once everything opens up, they want people to come back to their places, how it will become up. They will come to the same offices, they will go to hybrid model, they will go to work form remote and each and every company is experimenting in a different way. If we talk about Facebook experiment right now, which is doing, or Twitter experiment which is doing or HubSpot which is the way they are placing people, it is all different experiments are going on. And believe me, I do not want to comment anything on Q4 right now because things are going to change by the time Q4 comes up. We will see a new normal, we will see a new behaviour of candidate, they might not come back, they might not come back. Another just a short story, if we see a housing especially in a Texas or a Dallas side, it has gone up. Not because industry has gone up because people have gone there. They are working remotely, but cost of living is low. And labour market is also taking their own decisions. Now industry will move towards them because labour is there or labour has to come back to the cities where the older offices were there. Nobody knows. I have no predictions on that as of now.

Bill Batham: Okay, we are pretty much at the end of this interview even, before we wrap up, how can our listeners connect with you, whether that is through LinkedIn or email or Twitter or whatever you want to share there. And also how can they learn more about all the awesome things happening over at our Chile.

Vinay Johar: I am always open guy. So if you search on a Google vin which you can visit there, we will find everything we are doing specifically in this innovative section. We do have a startup section area on our website. We want to work with a lot of startups globally and even right now we are working where we can share all of our technologies to you and you can start using and build certain innovation. Two clients have raised $100 million and we are with them from day one. That is the whole success journey we all shared. And more about actually, yes, we are very aggressive. Specifically, my passion is startups. I work with many startups. I love to talk to startups and that is how we have a startup incubator program also available on our website. You can go ahead and join there. And third, you can always subscribe to our newsletter. We spend a lot of energy to build that newsletter. And the idea is there is not to give you information but valuable information about what is happening in the industry, how it is happening and who is the next unicorn to look for. We are going to cover everything into that.

Bill Batham: Perfect. Well, that just leaves me to say for today, Vinai, thank you very much for being a guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show. Vinay Johar: Thanks, Bill. Thanks very much. It is a really great talking to you. And it is a pretty mind-provoking or thought-provoking question you have. Thank you very much for asking these questions.

Bill Batham: That is my job. My pleasure. Absolutely. And listeners, as always, until next time, happy working and pleased to continue to stay safe. Bill Batham: Thank you for listening to the HR Chat podcast brought to you by the HR Gazette. SPEAKER_00: The Association for Talent Development Members and Customers are professionals who help others achieve their full potential by improving their knowledge, skills, and abilities in the workplace. They go by many titles, talent development managers, trainers, instructional designers, performance consultants, frontline managers, workplace learning professionals, and more. ATD's members come from more than 120 countries and work in organizations of all sizes and in all industry sectors. Interested in learning more about membership and ATD events? Visit atd.org