"We are working with 3500 colleges in the country", says Himanshu Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder, Aspiring Minds

Aspiring Minds was founded on the premise of democratizing job opportunities and creating an equitable platform for individuals across the country to have access to the right jobs. Aspiring Minds works closely with students, candidates and institutions in helping them objectively evaluate their employability and connecting them with prospective jobs opportunities. "We started building assessment tools which would be able to evaluate various components separately. We focused on building better products and broadening the scope of our tests. That's how we started building products for other industries, such as banking and financial services, and BPO sector, among others," says Himanshu Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder, Aspiring Minds."

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Aggarwal spoke about the need of evaluation and the recently launched automated evaluation tool-'SVAR'

Can you introduce Aspiring Minds for your audience?
Founded in September 2007, Aspiring Minds is a talent evaluation and assessment company. Whenever people look for jobs, a lot of people gets rejected due to many reasons and when you look at graduate firms and colleges, there is a big strory and a big issue of people saying that they have a degree but they are not employable. Lets say 100 engineering students are graduate but only 20% of them are employable. So the objective starts here to figure out that can you understand why people are not employable, like by evaluating there skills by various competency that a particular job would need them to have. So the idea was that if you could do this and able to use whatever technology you build around to take to individuals around the country, graduating students, job circles and give them a mechanism evaluate for a particular kind of job and to tell them what are they good at and what they are not so good at. On the other hand, we also provide the same rule to large corporations which recruits a large number of people. For all these resons we have built the employability assessment tools which would evaluate various aspects of a person.

Our target audience were the entry level job seekers because first you need to pick up a job then u go ahead with changes. The biggest challenge is getting the first job where you really not aware and do not know where you stand so the idea was to address the employability issue at the entry level. We started building assessment tools which would be able to evaluate various components separately.

What is the current employee strength? Do you have any plans to increase the number of employees or any expansion in other country?
The current employee strength is close to 350 and we are continuously hiring so we do expect to add some more people in the organization.
In terms of exapnsion, we are taking our product to Africa and looking for more oppotunities in Middle-East and in the US. We have already started operating in the US and our products are being sold over there.

Tell us about your flagship product ‘AMCAT' and how it is useful for students?
We believed that employability should be accessible, so we developed a proprietary assessment technology, AMCAT, which could reach out to students and employers anywhere, even in tier 4/5 cities.
AMCAT is delivered at colleges across the country making it convenient for students and candidates to appear for the same. The anywhere any time test has tens of thousands of takers every month making AMCAT by far the largest employability assessment in the country.
 
What is your company's strategy for education and training?
We are specialized into employability assessment and our strategy in this skill and training business is to help and evaluate what is being trained to students at various institutions and centers and to see whether a person is ready for a particular job or not. Our entire strategy is on to evaluation area, evaluating for job readiness or employability and thats where we work with all the largest skill and training providers. We are working with 3500 colleges in the country, also we work with NSDC. Our 100% focus is only on evaluation.

What are your selling models?
In India we sell it directly, through large corporations, institutions and in the Philippines or in the International markets, we have resellers and we typically work very closely with these resellers.

How SVAR (an automated Spoken English Assessment Tool) can help IT organizations with changing communication styles?
Aspiring Minds has rolled out India's first adaptive speech assessment test for employability called - SVAR. It is a telephone based, automated evaluation tool which provides a fair, consistent and a completely automated way to scientifically assess a person's English speaking, listening and comprehension skills. This provides a method to filter and interview suitable candidates by not only increasing interview convert rates but also significantly reducing bad hires and increasing overall quality of talent

The unique part of 'SVAR' as a technology is its automated way of evaluating spoken English.

Benchmarking study with one of the largest Global ITeS giant showed that SVAR could identify candidates with good spoken English when benchmarked against the evaluation done by voice trainers, with classification accuracy of 92%. SVAR measured spoken English of the candidates in same direction across all 6 traits, as measured manually by voice trainer.

Any tie-ups to be announced in the near future?
We can not say anything about the future but we have recently tied up with 'Monster' so Monster is now integrating MCAT.

What are the company's future plans?
We have always looked at opportunities and we would continue to introduce new technologies into evaluation. We are expanding globally and our business is already there in the Philippines.

We have started our business in the Middle-East and US. So yes there is a global expansion and also we are expecting to grow in the future as well.

What is the expected turnover for the next FY?
We are expecting to double the turnover this year.