B2B ecommerce marketplace for employers and recruiters - emPhi.com

35-40% of employers in India prefer the traditional ways of recruitment, routing it through their confidante recruiter. Traditional recruiting process has always been seeping with problems of demand-supply expectations and matching required skill sets. The iterative concepts and faulty manual processes, whims of recruiters, lack of knowledge and control, progress dash meters and long and tiring cycle of selecting and recruiting candidates are ubiquitous across the industry. Employers continue to identify structured communication process as a barrier to their business goals and hence affecting the conversion ratio. Many job portals did try to structure the recruitment process online but could not eliminate the dependency on traditional means.

To create an equal balance between cost, quality and time, Nikhil Rishi and Sanjay Govil conceptualized the idea in August 2012 of starting a B2B ecommerce marketplace which can give employers and recruiters a platform to leverage their capabilities. emPhi.com was finally launched in first week of July, 2013, as India's first pure B2B eCommerce marketplace which exclusively connects employers and recruiters on an online platform. The application employs many unique and proprietary algorithms to make the recruitment process intelligent and intuitive. It enables employers to improve the quality, reduce the cost of hiring as well as reduce the administrative workload. It also helps recruiters in reaching out to a large number of employers to help them better utilize their “book of candidates” in an efficient and cost-effective manner. After the vacancies have been posted by the employers along with the recruitment fee, the page is open for recruiters to bid. Once the bid is closed and recruiters are engaged, candidate profiles are shared for selection and final offers are sent. A vacancy posted by an employer is anonymous, until a recruiter’s bid is accepted by the employer, thus ensuring no spam and no cold calling. Once a candidate has been submitted to an employer by a recruiter, that candidate can not be submitted by any other recruiter to that employer for that vacancy and this control and monitoring is done by the software algorithms.

Now what is so unique about this online market place? Along with free registration and instant access to pre-validated network of recruiters and candidates, the software helps in eliminating duplicate applications and thus reduces vacancy fill time by filling vacancies faster through emPhi’s proprietary “vacancy & resume matching” algorithm. The application allows employers to work in a cost controlled environment and thus gives complete freedom to employers in defining a recruitment fee limit for recruiters, divert cold calls from recruiters to emPhi along with assigning different access rights to members of the employer’s recruitment team and hence manages them centrally. This is not all, emPhi streamlines administrative hassles like paperwork, contracting, approvals etc., for the employers, by becoming a single window vendor manager.

emPhi acts as an outsourced sales force for recruiters as well. It reduces business development costs by bidding for active open vacancies from pre-validated employers instead of spending on numerous cold calls and other traditional business development methods. It also enables recruiters to utilize their book of candidates better through the built-in workflow, thus scaling up the business. They can bid for vacancies from geographically far flung employers in the area of expertise, get direct access to all the job postings, get visibility on the competition, track the status of your candidate, and be evaluated based on their performance history.

emPhi charges 20% of the recruitment fees only after the recruiter makes a successful placement and delivers 80% to the successful recruiter. In this scenario emPhi offers a time-limited guarantee to employers, and hence recruiter’s payment will only be deposited in their accounts at the end of this period (60 days).

“We are a self-funded internet start-up with 2 founders and a few development testing contractors during the peak development phase. In addition to digital marketing we are also promoting the product at HR related seminars, conferences and forums. We are communicating value through website, blogs, forums and one-on-one discussions,” says Sanjay.

“While we are getting an exciting response from the marketplace, we are looking for VC funding to scale up the business to a viable and sustainable size. The primary plan is to further enhance the quality of hiring through premium back-office services which will include: qualitative review of resumes, more thorough validation and matching of recruiters to employers and vacancies, and potentially assisting employers for first level short-listing of candidates. We also plan to take the important steps in the workflow of marketplace to mobile to further enhance the usability and offerings to both employers as well as recruiters” says Nikhil.