Aishwarya Chaturvedi and Indrajeet Roy, alumni of IIT Delhi have created SkillWill to improve the employability of our country’s graduates. SkillWill is a self-assessment platform for students created by ANTZ AGE Technologies. Based out of Delhi, the company helps students understand their employability before they start applying to companies.
Indrajeet has more than 5 years of experience in Indian education industry. He has led the research in the field of Human Resources, Psychometric and Industrial Engineering. The team came up with the idea of SkillWill when Aishwarya realized that he had 4 interviews in a week during his placement semester. “I found it difficult to prioritize my preparations for these companies. They were all from different fields,” he says. “Indrajeet had gone through the same problem,” he added. They sat together with Abhay Chaturvedi (Angel Investor) and made a blueprint of the solution. That’s how they came up with Assessment for Graduate Employability (AGE), their company’s proprietary assessment product.
“We match you to jobs from 60 different job sectors. We do this after assessing you for 22 employability skills and matching you to the right job, specific to your core area. We did this because we didn't see multiple examinations, that screen you for the job and rejects you without a feedback, bringing in any value. A single preparatory exam goes a long way to solve this conundrum.” says Indrajeet.
So how is SkillWill different from its competitors?
- SkillWill conducts initial aptitude tests for students and makes them understand employability. They connect students, trainers and companies on skills. Companies tell them how important certain skills are, trainers tell how much can they improve each of these skills in the students and students can assess how good they are at those skills.
- A comprehensive test of analytical, communicative, technical and interpersonal abilities figures out the students' way forward and they only recommend jobs that match to students’ profile obtained as above. The other products in the market rarely take interpersonal skills of students into account, if any.
- SkillWill is designed to facilitate student’s job search thoroughly following this five step process:
- Know what companies need – The team quantifies what the jobs are looking for and the respective weights of each skill for every job.
- Know yourself – SkillWill assessment profiles students on 24 employability skills collected from the Kent University and FICCI’s skills framework.
- Find the gap – Students know quantitatively their largest gaps, as well as the strongest skills. They can model their resume, cover letters and interview preparation accordingly.
- Fill the gap – Based on the person’s skills profile, the SkillWill team connects him to the right trainers and trainings helping him prepare well for the job. In addition, SkillWill makes available excellent tools, worldwide that help student prepare better.
- Hit the target – In the jobs that student is most employable, SkillWill team sends him job openings collected from recruiters, off campus portals and direct companies.
This team of 5 employees with 15 interns from IIT’s use an analytical framework which unites all the students, trainers and recruiters strictly around employability skills. The product is built on PHP Yii framework. They plan to expand to a team of 50 people soon. “We are looking to build a pan-India presence over the next 6 months, assessing 1,00,000 students from cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Chandigarh and Jaipur,” says Indrajeet.
The company is part bootstrapped by its founders, Indrajeet and Aishwarya. The company has its angels in form of Abhay Chaturvedi and Prabhat Chaturvedi. "We are at a seed stage and working with $250k of funds over the next 6 months," they added. As a message for future entrepreneurs, Aishwarya says, "If your gut says no, trust your intuition. But if your gut says 'yes, but I'm a little scared', feel the fear and do it anyway."
SkillWill is a venture focused on achieving scale and growing fast. The team is always on its toes, be it product development or product marketing. We are also focused on providing the best customer experience around the product (and the services). The team is excited and hungry for more.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtC8H65Tp4]
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