Delhi-based startup Grownout attempts to make hiring easy, quick and fun

How to find and hire great talent is a big challenge before every business. The favorite solution -- perhaps the best -- is referral hiring. But that too comes with its own set of problems. Like for instance, the process is almost entirely manual. Grownout, a business-to-business startup based on a SaaS (Software as a service) model, attempts to make the hiring as smooth as possible.

Grownout ensures that the company gets the network of all of its employees first hand and do not need to depend on the employees to reach out to them, says Sumit Gupta, CEO and Co-founder.

Currently, this Delhi-based startup focuses only on Indian market and have 12 B2B active users for the first version of their product, released in March.

Among Nasscom top startups

Grownout has two co-founder: Sumit Gupta and Harsimran Walia. Sumit was born and brought up in a small town in Rajasthan. He graduated in Computer Science & Engineering from New Delhi. Harsimran is from Chandigarh. After completing mechanical engineering from IIT Delhi, he worked with Oracle and then Macfee before taking the entrepreneurial plunge with GrownOut. The transition from a well-paying regular job to running a startup was a little rough for Harsimran. After all, you don't get a hefty paycheck in your account anymore. But the adrenaline rush of being an entrepreneur and the fun of doing what you love soon outweighed the initial pangs.

"We both wanted to do something which would just change the way things were supposed to be," Sumit says. Both of them had firsthand experience of how taxing the hiring process usually is and decided to figure out a way to make it easy, quick and -- "most importantly, interesting".

Sumit and Harsimran started working on Grownout in January 2013. During the alpha and beta development phases, both of them worked from Chandigarh and Himalayas. They shifted base to New Delhi after completing beta version of the product, which they launched in November 2013. "A lot changed since then. After successfully testing and validating beta version, we got funded and also selected by Nasscom 10000 startups as one of the top startups. We were also shortlisted by 500 startups," Sumit says.

Now, Grownout are a 7-member team.

The business model

Grownout has filed for patent on their idea and process. Sumit says: "We have a couple of competitors, who may affect our market like Entelo, WhistleTalk, YesGraph, RolePoint and MyParichay." According to him, there are two types of hiring solutions:

1. One which offer Candidate Sourcing

2. Other which provide Application Tracking System.

At GrownOut, "we provide one-stop solution, where companies can find suitable quality candidates from its own network, and can track hiring process at internal application tracking system itself. So once a hiring manager is on the GrownOut platform, he/she doesn’t need to go anywhere else," Sumit says.Grownout provide their clients with free credits to use the product, learn its value before they start start paying for it from the fourth month onward following the SaaS model. "Charges are based on per employee per month."

Technology adoption is one of the biggest challenges before Grownout. "Most of our end users are non-technical and like to stick to their traditional methods, which creates hurdles in making them realize the value that Grownout provides them," Sumit says.

Building a strong team is a huge challenge for all startups but as that's Grownout core competency, it was a walk in the park for them according to Sumit. "We were the first to take advantage of the Grownout dream that we are living," he says.

Check out Grownout here.

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