EntHire Part 1: How Our Journey Began
Abhishek, Anuraag, and Nikunj met at IIT Kharagpur in 2009. Their friendship was formed while sharing a dorm, during nights of studying, and spending their entire bachelor’s together. When they graduated in 2013, all three of them had a plan in place — Abhishek joined Facebook USA as a developer, Anuraag joined ITC and Nikunj got in the MS program at UC Berkeley. But even from different continents, they kept their friendship intact. Nikunj and Anuraag kept up their weekly phone calls. And Abhishek and Nikunj travelled all over the bay area during summer breaks.
In the two or three years that followed graduation, Abhishek moved from San Francisco to New York while still working for Facebook. Anuraag jumped ship to an asset management firm in Mumbai and eventually moved to the US as well. And Nikunj graduated from UCB to join an early-stage start-up called ‘Reflektion’ in the valley.
Nikunj was one of only six members of his new company. He was right at the heart of growing a new product, and a new team. Over the years he led the machine learning team at Reflektion and expanded it both in the US and in India. This expansion was not easy. Even with recruiters on their side, not only were good candidates hard to find, the hiring procedure gobbled up a significant portion of their time and money. After more than three years at Reflektion, he decided to look for a new opportunity. By this time his team had grown to over 60 employees and they were working with e-commerce companies that handled a user base of over 600 million.
As with anyone looking to switch jobs, he interviewed for a dozen companies. And gave hour-long coding interviews at least a dozen times. At one of those interviews, he had a particularly unresponsive experience. The interviewer did not attempt to brainstorm the solution or interact with him. This meant that he couldn’t pick on the many intrinsic signals about the problem-solving abilities of his candidate. It was nothing short of an automated coding environment that ended up wasting both their time.
Several days later, and after clearing several technical and HR rounds at a company, Nikunj sat opposite to another interviewer. He was supposed to be giving a system design round. The interviewer started by saying -
“I haven’t heard of the company you work for so I am assuming you don’t know much about scale. Let me dumb down my questions for you.”
Now, if the interviewer had taken some time to go through Nikunj’s resume he would’ve found how he scaled the number of monthly users at his last company from 15,000 to 600 million. Even with a degree from UCB and IIT, Nikunj found a lot of interviewers were quick to form opinions based on the name of the company he had worked for instead of his skill in scaling engineering systems.
His two experiences — hiring for Reflektion and getting hired as a candidate made the downsides of talent acquisition in the software industry pretty obvious to him. A lot of biases still existed in assessment processes that prevented good candidates from advancing. Most companies did not train their interviewers in the right way. And the hiring procedure ended up wasting more time than needed.
Why wasn’t a proper interviewing system set up? An unbiased system to evaluate candidates based on their skills. This candidate data could be made available to companies and save everyone some serious time and resources.
With all these things in mind, Nikunj finally accepted a job offer from Facebook. However, even while busy at work, he did not let these problems slip from his mind. He contacted his two friends from college — Abhishek and Anuraag.
Abhishek was always keen on starting something of his own. He was also familiar with the rigorous and calibrated training of interviewers on Facebook. The idea of solving the hiring problem by making it more technology-based and organized seemed worth solving, and so he jumped on board. Anuraag who was in Singapore working in WorldQuant by then joined their discussions to take care of the business side of things.
And so over long video calls spanning 2 continents, their start-up journey began.
