Featured Startup Pitch: Recroup wants to replace the hated resume with active job candidate ‘challenges’

By Amit Chauhan, Recroup co-founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: With Recroup, companies can now stop hiring resumes and start hiring people by creating challenges, not just jobs. Job seekers can stop sending resumes and send their story to recruiters in the form of a Recroup profile.

Product Services & Description

The web is crowded with job boards, but they are not helping job seekers to get the right job, nor are they helping recruiters find the best talent. The reason behind this is that all job boards are still using resumes to represent candidates. This is why we created Recroup, which is not a job board, but your career Launchpad.

Challenges: At Recroup, companies can post challenges. Those challenges can be anything from writing a sales pitch to creating a micro-blogging site. So now job seekers can take a break from sending resumes and take the challenge to prove their skills. This helps recruiters to find the best talent for the job without digging into tons of resumes. On many occasions, these challenges can serve as the first round of interviews.

These challenges serve even greater value to recruiters since they allow them to create a talent database of people with a proven skillset.

Applicant Story (Profile): Every job seeker is different, but resumes make them all look the same. This is why at Recroup we replaced resumes with a profile that allows job seekers to display the full spectrum of their capabilities. Applicants can add their social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and their technical profiles like Github and Stackoverflow to receive badges on their online activities. This helps applicants to display their social presence to recruiters in a secure and protected manner.

Perk Board: We know that companies spend millions on talent by offering them amazing perks, but prospective employees hardly know about those perks. At Recroup, we allow companies to create a ‘perk page’ for their organization and show off what they offer apart from the salary. This gives companies an opportunity to increase response rate for their job position by four times, and also create more interest among job seekers. Share the perk page on the web and spread your awesomeness.

Founders’ Story

I believe in learning by doing. I learned about the entertainment business while working in a film production company in Los Angeles. I moved to India to get into web development and joined Heurion Consulting as business development manager. Soon, I was made project head of Heurion’s in-house project called ‘TestimonialsFor.’ This is when I started interacting with Shiv and Kaushik, who are the technical co-founders of Recroup. Shiv, Kaushik and I worked on various projects together during our tenure at Heurion before we decided to branch out and start Recroup in January, 2013.

Marketing & Promotions

Recroup College Rep: We are starting a college rep program where we will hire a college student as our part-time brand manager. The idea is to reach the future work force and prepare them for the job market.

Recruiters Referral Program: We will give our early customers an opportunity to use our system for free during the trial period, but they will be given an opportunity to extend that period by referring Recroup to someone else. On every successful referral they will receive a free job post.

Market Opportunity

Koncept Analytics, a research company that offers industry reports, projects that the global recruitment industry will grow by 9.36 percent by 2015 (from $292.1 billion in 2010 to $456.97 billion).

Our primary market is the U.S. and our secondary market is India.

U.S. companies spend maximum money in order to reach the top talent not just in U.S., but globally. With an improving economy, more jobs are available in both the private and public sector. There are nearly 20,000 staffing companies operating about 40,000 offices in the United States.

India has the highest population of college students and job seekers in the world. All top companies have offices in India and are constantly looking to hire more people.

How Recroup Is Different

As I have already said, Recroup is not a job board, it’s a ‘career launchpad.’ With Recroup, job seekers can tell their story in a way a resume cannot.

Challenges, Not Just Jobs: At Recroup, companies post challenges, not just jobs. Those challenges allow companies to see the real skills of the applicants even before they invite them for an interview.

Protected Social View: Nearly 92 percent of recruiters like to check the social media profile of candidates. At Recroup, we protect job seekers’ privacy but still provide recruiters useful analysis of applicants’ online activities.

Active Talent Pool: Most of the existing platform companies create inactive talent pools where talent is not really interacting with the company. At Recroup, we allow companies to create a dynamic talent pool with help of challenges and perk pages.

Business Model

We offer monthly subscriptions for recruiters to use Recroup. There are various options available to suit everyones’ needs.

Free Subscription: This option allows companies to create a perk page and post one job every month.

Individual Recruiter ($49/Month): This option allows recruiters to post four jobs every month. Along with all the premium applicant tracking tools and social hiring, you will get 10 percent off on the first challenge you create and 20 percent off on every subsequent challenge.

Corporate Account ($99/Month): With all the features provided in the previous plan, you can post up to eight jobs and can create a team of five individual recruiters. Here we offer 20 percent off on the first challenge and 30 percent off on all subsequent challenges.

Pay Per Challenge: Companies can create challenges for $200/challenge. All challenges are active for 60 days. Applicant tracking is available for three months for free account holders and six months for premium account holders.

Current Needs

We are currently raising our Seed round and looking for investors. We are also looking for industry experts to join us as advisors.

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Website: www.recroup.com