Online assessment platform helps recruiters check prospective employees’ Mettl

Set up in 2009, Gurugram-based Mettl now has 1,800 clients across the world and provides innovative offerings for recruitment and talent management around assessments.

It started as a training consultancy company, but Mettl today claims to be one of the world’s largest B2B SaaS-based online assessment platforms. Based in Gurugram, the online platform mainly focuses on helping companies evaluate and analyse skills of current and prospective employees through a series of assessments. It also offers a gamut of other services on its platform to help organisations in better talent management.

It all began in 2009 when Co-founders Ketan Kapoor and Tonmoy Shingal came together with a common vision: leveraging technology for hiring practices in Indian and global companies.

The duo pooled in Rs 8 lakh in 2009 and went on to make an initial investment of about Rs 45 lakh provided by family and friends the very next year.

With the rising demand for industry-linked training and skill assessment services, the duo realised that they had a massive opportunity in front of them, one that very few people had identified at that time. With a strong focus on developing skill assessment and hiring solutions for middle and lower-level management in organisations, the duo established Mettl in 2010.

“When we began studying the recruitment practices of large Indian and global organisations, we found that most companies around the world were not employing any kind of tech-based and data-backed hiring solution for the employee’s entire lifecycle,” says Ketan Kapoor, Co-founder of Mettl.

The idea was well received. In 2011, the company raised Rs. 1.6 crore from Blume Ventures, an early stage investor, and a year later $4 million from nine different investors led by venture capital fund Kalaari Capital.

During its initial years, Ketan highlights that the company’s growth was propelled by “keeping overheads low, re-investing profits back into the business, researching the market and challenges, learning and doing as much as possible on their own, and staying adaptive and relevant”.

Today, the company is serving more than 1,500 businesses, 24 sector skill councils, and 10-plus educational institutions through their innovative offerings for recruitment, talent management, and technology solutions around assessments. Mettl now has a presence in over 100 countries.

Diversifying offerings

From providing skill assessment tools, the company soon diversified into HR hiring, psychometric use cases, cognitive use cases, certification, domain testing, education use cases, learning and development use case, and pre/post assessment cases.

Mettl now offers recruitment assessment, programming tests, psychometric tests, aptitude tests, pre-built test library of 200-plus tests, an interview app, vocational skills assessment, remote proctoring, deep analytics in performance management, and certification platform, among others.

“While venturing out into new markets, the head-on strategy of going places and exploring new geographies failed and crashed. The insight of prior customer feedback and product knowledge later translated into success in terms of untapped markets,” Ketan says.

The growth story

Since 2015, Mettl’s EBIDTA went into positive, with a quarter-on-quarter growth of 20 percent across all markets and product offerings. Though this was big for the company, it came with a few learnings along the way.

“Mettl swiftly moved up from 0 to 1 crore and finally became profitable in FY2015,” Ketan says. From 50 employees in 2013, the company has on-boarded 300 employees today.

In the last few years, Mettl’s clientele rose from 200 to a whopping 1,800. Their portfolio now includes renowned enterprises like Accenture, Capgemini, Wipro, SAP, KPIT, Syntel, Tally, Here Maps, NIIT, Cognizant, Samsung, NASSCOM, L&T, Mahindra Comviva, MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Amity University, ISB, and UPES, among others.

Kartheek Peyyeti, Campus Recruitment Manager of American Express, says: “Mettl's assessments are an integral part of our campus recruitment processes. They help filter a high percentage of candidates, ensuring that only the best from our applicant pool make it through.”

Mettl's expansive suite of predictive applications, talent assessment, and management tools is helping many organisations across the globe assess and find the right talent.

What’s next?

Since last year, the platform has been expanding to international markets like the US, China, Mexico, Germany, Philipines, Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, and UAE.

Going ahead, the company aims to back its product portfolio with machine learning and artificial intelligence, new theoretical knowledge, and new skills. Currently, the platform can assess for over 800 skills across various industries in more than 20 international and national languages.

Mettl’s vision for 2020 is to clock a turnover of Rs 200 crore.

“We aim to provide a complete talent management software for the entire world to work with,” Ketan signs off.