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We have added 44,000 contractors from India over the past year: Praveen Madire, Founder and CEO of Techfynder

In an interview with BW Disrupt, Mr Praveen Madire ,Founder and CEO of Techfynder, talks about expansion, funding and monetization model, competitors and more.

1. Brief us about your business model like how did the idea came to start and how does it work (step by step procedure)?

Techfynder have professionals who has enormous amount of experience in IT Staffing. We basically did a gap analysis and figured out that there isn’t a portal exclusively for IT Contract staffing. There are no straightforward platforms that the technology contractors can use to promote themselves to new businesses and find new opportunities. A similar situation is experienced by the businesses as we figured out, job portals doesn't prove to be particularly effective to fulfil contracting positions. This prompted us to come up with a portal. 

We have kept it very simple and easy to use.

The portal is absolutely free for the jobseekers and its subscription based for the employers (No commission involved). 

  • The candidates register on the portal and upload their profile. They can also search for relevant jobs and can apply directly on the portal.
  • The companies will buy the monthly subscription. We have 3 variants; Standard, Premium and Strategic. The companies will do their job posting on the portal. They can view the direct portal applicants and also search for the relevant profiles from the database too.
  • The recruiters can directly interact with the candidates on the portal, message them, and schedule either face to face interviews or online interviews too. This portal doubles up as an ATS as well.

Our AI based systems will suggest the suitable profiles based on the search criteria. The recruiters can shortlist the profiles for future use when they foresee a job coming up in a few weeks’ time. 

2. What are the unique key points of your company?

This is a company headquartered in Ireland with offices in the US, Spain and India. We are one of it’s kind and our USP is our job portal that’s a major differentiating factor. No other company has a job portal exclusive to IT Contract staffing. The portal is used by candidates and companies across 125 countries and has been widely accepted by the corporates.

3. How are you different from the existing competitors?

We are one of it’s kind and our USP is our job portal that’s a major differentiating factor. No other company has a job portal exclusive to IT Contract staffing. In fact, we don’t have competition as no other company has such portal.

 4. What is the funding status and monetization model?

The development of Techfynder has been supported by Enterprise Ireland through R&D funding. The EI is supporting companies that put innovation first and Techfynder is a company that is both innovative and one that is thinking globally. We were considered for their High Potential Start-up Programme and received two different grants from Enterprise Ireland. R&D Funding and Market Development Grant.

 5. What challenges are you facing in running your business?

Firstly, we need to do a lot of concept selling as this is pretty new. Making the prospects understand the value of our portal is the first challenge, and we have addressed it quite successfully. 

There have been challenges in branding our company due to Covid 19. We had to restrict ourselves to digital marketing and newspaper ads and cannot do any physical branding activities like putting up hoardings etc. in our target market. 

Our Target segment has been IT professionals and since many of them across the globe have been working from home, we felt that there’s no point in coming up with hoardings in IT parks and SEZ zones. 

Things are changing and we must be able to overcome these obstacles sooner than later.

6. How has been the people`s response so far?

Phenomenal. 

Many corporate companies have welcomed this idea and have appreciated us for coming up with a portal. There was a need for such portal and we have addressed the need in a most efficient and cost-effective manner. This portal saves the companies lot of money, which they would have otherwise spent on the contract staffing companies in the form of margins.

Since it’s free for the candidates, they have shown great response and are registering on our portal. Thousands of candidates register on our portal in a day across the geographies. 

7. What are your marketing plans?

To achieve our marketing objectives, we plan to build a strong online presence using inbound and outbound marketing strategies. Email marketing, Social media marketing, SEO, Content marketing, Google Ads, Blogging, paid placement campaigns, etc., are considered and a right strategy mix is prepared in order to increase our revenues and growth rate.

8. What are the traction details (like users and other achievements of the company)

We have added 44,000 contractors from India over the past year. Our platform now has 45,000 contractors registered from the country, depicting a 45-fold increase in its Indian user base vis-a-vis last year’s 1,000 contractors. More than 122,000 contractors have joined the platform globally during the Q3 of the calendar year 2020 - a 32% QoQ growth in terms of users. Techfynder now sees a daily user rate of 87% by IT contractors, with 250 clients actively hiring.

9. How do you look at expansion?

We are looking at both geographical diversification and product / services diversification as well. 

Right now, we have been catering to IT sector only and now we have started expanding to other sectors like Pharma and Healthcare, BFSI, Automotive, Manufacturing etc. We have established offices in South Africa and South American countries, and we are looking at expanding it to Asia Pacific and Australia too. 

10. What has been the biggest learning’s so far?

We learnt that in some geographies like India, it is not just the quality of profiles but the quantity matters too! The positioning should be different for different geographies. So is the pricing. 

Most of the companies in India would like to go for a free trial before taking the paid subscription. So, we came up with one about 3-4 month’s ago. The segmentation, targeting and positioning strategies should be clearly defined for each geography and we should also have the flexibility to change the strategies on the go. 

 11. What is the market size and opportunity?

  • The global information technology industry is on pace to reach $5.2 trillion in 2021.
  • India has one of the largest flexible staffing workforce numbers in the world, next only to China and the US. 
  • The government employs a temporary workforce of about 12.3 million.
  • Flexi staffing market is poised to grow 10% to 15% year-on-year
  • The retail sector is expected to witness growth to the tune of 10% to 12% per annum, making it the most lucrative option for a massive growth in flexible staffing.
  • The penetration of contract staff in the IT and [IT-enabled-Services] industry is also likely to increase from 10% to 20% in the next few years.
  • According to the Indian Staffing Federation, there are at present 1.3 million temporary workers in the organized sector, which is likely to increase to 9 million workers in the next 10 years.



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