In an interview with TechGraph, Girish Kukreja, Founder & CEO of FlexC, said, “Indian talent has seen tremendous demand leading to the situation of competition in attracting talent.”
TechGraph: How does “FlexC” look these days?
Girish Kukreja: In the journey so far, FlexC has surpassed the first and second phase of growth which was- to create an AI-powered digital platform and achieve the ideal supply of consultants, organizations and recruiting agencies.
Currently, FlexC is heading to the third phase where we are focused on increasing the efficiency of our model, multiplying 10X and customizing our user’s experience. At present FlexC, has more than 20K professionals across 400+ skills.We have 200+ agencies for our talent aggregation model. And more than 500 organizations are redesigning their workforce structure with FlexC.
TechGraph: Could you please shed light on FlexC’s innovative product offerings?
Girish Kukreja: FlexC is an AI-powered talent marketplace curated keeping in mind all the evolving requirements of an organization’s hybrid workforce. FlexC offers organizations better resources to hire and manage their hybrid workforce, and provides professionals better flexibility in opportunities with contracting and permanent employment. It also provides HR recruiters access to a plethora of business opportunities.
FlexC Hire: A one-stop platform to hire and manage permanent employees. Shortlist best candidates recommended from FlexC’s AI tool and in-built recruiter network, conduct interviews, onboard and get going.
FlexC Contract: Curated to onboard and manage the complete employment cycle of your contractors in a single streamlined flow. Doesn’t matter if they are hired from FlexC’s marketplace or some other platform. You can bring your contractor database here and manage all operations at one place.
FlexC Freelance: Hire the finest freelance consultants across 400+ skills, and automate your entire process- from onboarding to milestone tracking and final payments.
FlexC Force: An integrated SaaS platform curated to make your time taking implementation cycles effortless. Customize FlexC as per your brand requirements and improve the efficiency of talent acquisition and business management.
TechGraph: How do you feel ‘FlexC’ stands out from LinkedIn Jobs, BambooHR, and others who are already in this business?
Girish Kukreja: FlexC has managed to go an extra mile from all the current businesses in the market and has established a talent marketplace. We standout in three aspects: –
1- More than ATS- We come with a network of HR recruiters and professionals to solve the talent gaps organizations face. Our Talent aggregation will be uberizing the HR recruitment for permanent hires.
2- An AI-automated pre-screening process- Cuts down the cycle time by at least 50%. This is applicable to the organization’s own talent database, agencies talent pool and talent pool on the platform.
3- Managing the complete flexible workforce on the platform – Spend analytics, payments, tax compliances, time tracking and milestone tracking.
TechGraph: Could you give us an overview of the growth of the marketplace as a business model for talent needs?
Girish Kukreja: The workforce in Indian organizations is dominated by permanent hires >95%. Whereas in developed countries the same occupy only 60-65% of the workforce, leaving the rest of the room for freelancers and contractual employees.
Unlike developed countries such as the US and UK, the Indian market has still not experienced the benefits of a hybrid workforce model. Talent Marketplace has been popular in B2B2C spaces like Upwork and freelancer, but in B2B space it’s still in early stages.
Talent marketplace established for blue- collar jobs has seen huge success like Urban Company, Uber, Swiggy etc. This is also very popular in skills like Designing, Marketing, Technical writing etc. I believe the next phase of growth will come from B2B where organizations will adopt a talent marketplace platform for hiring contractors and freelancers or for project- specific assignments.
At FlexC, we have extended this to have a network of freelance recruiters and agencies helping companies hire permanent employees as well, which makes us the only platform to provide complete hybrid workforce hiring on a single platform.
TechGraph: What are your plans around talent acquisition and new products and formats?
Girish Kukreja: We at FlexC will follow principles of virtual first organization. We are a 25 members strong team and have 200+ agencies and 15K professionals as our extended workforce.
We want to create an ecosystem where professionals on our platform will have maximum continuity of work, flexibility of work hours, opportunities to upskill and enough entrepreneurial opportunities to expand the network.
Our focus on talent acquisition will constitute our extended workforce. And we will be using our platform to engage and build a solid relationship with them.
TechGraph: HR & HRTech seem to have benefited from COVID-19. Why do you think that is happening?
Girish Kukreja: The pandemic has reshaped the way people work. While many companies didn’t have a WFH policy in place, they had to make the whole workforce work from home. Onboarding of employees is more logistics (sending laptop, forms etc to employee’s home) than engagement in the office.
This has accelerated digitization and has put the same pressure on HR to adopt HR Tech for employee hiring, monitoring, engagement etc. With the whole world putting an acceleration pedal for their digitization journeys and India receiving more startup funding in H1 2021.
Indian talent has seen tremendous demand leading to the situation of competition in attracting talent. This is also putting the pressure of higher costs on businesses. The future of employee engagement has to be through technology, and with WFH becoming the norm this has to be the most important topic for all HRs to adopt.
TechGraph: Do you see the current market as a zero-sum game between FlexC and your competitors or is there room for everyone to grow together?
Girish Kukreja: I think the talent marketplace as space is still in its early stage and there is enough room for all competitors to grow together. Also, in this space, it may really not be the top 2 that takes the complete market share, but it will possibly be the top 4-5 players.
The global staffing industry is worth $500bn, with platform- based recruitment only $28bn growing to $47Bn by 2027. This makes enough room for technology platforms to disrupt this industry and have new unicorns within this space itself.