Aggarwal brothers delve deep into the ‘soul of India’ to tap talent

“The soul of India lives in its villages,” said Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi nearly a hundred years back. A hundred years later the situation hasn’t changed much. The 2001 census of India said that nearly 74% of India still lives in its villages.

Even with such a glaring statistic staring at their faces, most corporates have stayed away from recruiting from small towns and villages. But to give the corporates the benefit of doubt, there wasn’t any reliable metrics they could use to shortlist prospective employees from all across India.

“We have still three hundred or four hundred million people who are locked out of urban India or out of the mainstream economy. There is a big void between companies that demand talent, which are often complaining about attrition and scarcity and so on and all these people who would like to get a job and are often qualified to get a job, but there is no mechanism to break down the institutional barriers between them,”   says Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School.

To fill this gap, brothers Himanshu and Varun Aggarwal set up Aspiring Minds in July 2007. “There is a widely quoted report done by McKinsey for Nasscom which talked about 1 of 4 engineers being employable. And that got us thinking. Is there a way to find an employable person in a small town or a village? Is there a way for an employable person in a small town or unknown college to present a compelling case for himself/herself to the corporates?” explains Himanshu, on what got them going.

Himanshu did his B Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Delhi, whereas Varun did his Masters in computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, and was part of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Aspiring Minds has a large pan-India team which approaches colleges and executes tests which typically assess candidates in their last year of education or once they have graduated. 

These tests assess the cognitive skills (which include English and comprehension, analytical skills and number skills), personality and domain skills. Domain skills include a range of modules from programming, telecommunications, mechanical engineering, financial services, accounting, etc.

A candidate can go through 6 modules (3 cognitive skill modules, 1 personality, 1 or 2 domain skills) depending on his qualification and area of interest. The test lasts 2.5 hours. The tests are adaptive in nature and get harder or simpler depending on the responses of the candidate.

“Of course when companies use the test to assess their walk-ins, internal candidates they can choose the modules they would like to assess candidates on,” says Himanshu. “As of now over 180,000 candidates have taken the test and are a part of our database. Over 8,000 candidates have been hired by our clients based on these tests,” he adds.

This is where Aspiring Minds is very different from all those job portals out there. A job portal essentially matches resumes and job openings and not skill sets and job openings like Aspiring Minds does.

As Himanshu explains, “A candidate taking the test has to pay a nominal fee (about `300). The test is delivered at their college location by our onsite assessment team in computer labs. Post the test the candidates get a detailed feedback report (6 to 7 pages) about their employability ranging from their strengths and weaknesses, best profile match, skill gaps, etc. They become part of our employment database and are invited for job interviews where their profile is a fit.”

Aspiring Minds also helps corporate assess from these pre-assessed candidates. 

“Corporates pay us a nominal success-based fee on every candidate offered. We help them run recruitment pan-India, inviting shortlisted candidates, managing the events and rolling out offers. Typically, our recruitment events see a 35% to 60% interview convert rate,” says Himanshu.

Khanna, who is also on the board of advisors, says, “The idea is to very cost-effectively, almost seamlessly, test almost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, in different locations and make those available to corporations. So when you go around to our biggest corporations and say where are you sourcing talent from? Even the most ambitious of them will say from fifty, sixty or hundred colleges. You can tell them why not twenty thousand colleges and here is a cost-effective way to do it.”