An AI-based Chatbot Is Helping Engineers With New Employment Opportunities 'While big companies are on a cost-cutting mode, small ones are on a good growth trajectory'

Major global information technology (IT) companies are the ones conducting mass lay-offs. Thousands of engineers are mulling a shift in their career paths.

As this sector grapples with the threat of automation, hiring hurdles and slowdown in outsourcing assignments, a Bangalore-based start-up Xobin has launched Interact, world's first conversational assessment platform in March 2017.

The platform revolves around a highly intelligent chatbot that removes the stress out of the assessments and makes it personalized and interesting for the candidates to complete them.

The platform has assessed closed to 50,000 candidates till date and is used by 50+ companies in more than seven countries. The platform ensures a 40 per cent reduction in the number of candidates the hiring managers screen. It also improves the interview to hire ratio by over 50 per cent. At an outset the platform saves close to 100 hours for every successful hire.

In an interview with Entrepreneur India, founder Guruprakash Sivabalan revealed some recent hiring trends in this domain.

Smaller Software Companies Are On Hiring Spree

On being questioned about the kind of jobs engineers are currently looking for, Sivabalan said he witnessed an increase in the number of job applications for smaller software companies with 100 to 5,000 employees.

"While bigger ones are on a cost-cutting mode, many small services companies are on a good growth trajectory. A good number of engineers working in small brands have opted to upskill themselves. Being a software engineer involves continuously upgrading your skill sets, irrespective of what your current job requires," he said.

"95 per cent of innovation in technology we have today is made possible by the top 5 per cent engineers who keep pushing themselves outside their comfort zone. And these engineers are loaded with a minimum of three to five job offers at any given moment," he added.

Lay-offs Are Result Of Bad Hiring, More Than Prevailing Market Condition

Sivabalan said HRs of these MNCs decide to hire 2,000 to 3,000 candidates in 24 hours, by partnering with some Tier II colleges and in such a short time these candidates cannot be assessed properly.

Talking about improvising assessments, Sivabalan explained, "More parameters should be introduced while assessing candidates. Most importantly, they should judge whether a candidate is a quick learner. Candidates, who have an appetite to continuously learn and solve problems, should be given more priority than those who aspire to settle down fast."

"A new approach of selecting candidates could be by giving them a series of assessments. The focus should be on understanding the ability of a candidate to learn quickly, rather than checking their immediate skill sets and GPA. Conducting more serious assessments could fundamentally transform the recruitment procedure on the whole as companies will only take in competent candidates," he added.

Xobin's six-member team also gives its candidates an Interview Simulator, where they can simulate the Interview experiences of Google, Tesla, Microsoft and 3000+ companies. There are close to 20,000+ graduates on the firm's platform.