Network hiring start-up ZenRadius receives seed funding

Despite the ever-growing map of social media and email contacts, recruiters face a daunting task when searching for apt job profiles. Even today, referrals turn out to be far more effective than going through job forums and applications.  Bangalore-based start-up ZenRadius aims to bring a change to this industry by bringing analytics and network hiring into the picture.

“The moment you think about referral hiring, there are 20-odd companies that rush to your mind. But each one of them is into random referrals, which is mostly incentive-based – you come to the platform, refer a friend of yours, and if she gets hired, you get US$20,” said co-founder Nitesh Mishra.

The ZenRadius engine uses analytics to select the right people to make referrals for the job descriptions you post. It also increases your recruiting circle of referrals by looking into your contacts as well as contacts of your contacts. Mishra claims that this engine is useful for large corporate names like Goldman Sachs as well as start-ups.

Before ZenRadius, Mishra and co-founders Arpit Kumar and Alok Yadav, all from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, were running a big data analytics company called SmokeLift. “It was profitable too, with clients like Ola and Practo,” says Mishra. “But we wanted to build a product that solves a real world problem, which is massive, still broken, and can be solved with technology. So we were on the lookout for such an idea even while running SmokeLift.”

The most recent development from the ZenRadius camp is their seed funding from TraxcnLabs and Deepak Singh, founder and director of Anzy Careers.

“Over the years, we have seen that people we hired through common friends had much higher degree of success but the process of finding people through the network was very tiring. We thought technology could simplify this process significantly,” commented Abhishek Goyal, cofounder of Tracxn Labs, an incubator started by startup tracking company Tracxn and that is backed by the Flipkart cofounders.
Tracxn, which had recently raised $10 million from Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, claims to have 7,000 startups and close to 21,000 companies in the US registered with its database.