How This Bengaluru Startup is Making External Hiring Obsolete
Tech is moving fast, and companies are finding it hard to keep their teams upskilled. At the same time, managing the cost of talent is equally challenging. This is the problem Spire.ai is solving. The company has been in the talent space for eighteen years—long before ‘AI’ became the ubiquitous term it is today. “The cost of talent is increasing significantly,” said Saurabh Jain, founder of Spire.ai, in an exclusive interview with AIM. “Organisations need to sustain their costs while still having the room for growth and bringing in new talent.” However, he explained that cost management cannot come at the expense of preparedness. “Our objective is to make organisations completely resilient from a skills and talent point of view,” he said, adding that businesses cannot predict how they would be impacted by technological innovation over the next three to five years. This makes continuous learning and skills development a necessary investment. Organisations face a range of operational issues, from acquiring talent and creating succession plans to growing existing employees. Even when process problems are solved, issues remain with speed, ease, efficiency and cost. “Our solutions are designed to complement existing systems,” Jain said. “Organisations have already made heavy investments in ERP and talent systems. We do not replace them, we add value without disrupting these systems.” Path-breaking Products The company has recently developed Agent Sigma, which gives employees an understanding of what skills they have acquired, identifies gaps and opportunities and tells them about their potential to learn. It also continuously tracks growth opportunities within the organisation. Besides, the company has developed a suite of products which includes: Skills AI Copilot, Empollination, Skilling.Exchange, Continuum.Exchange, Talent Map Live, Talent Exchange, Recruitment.Exchange, and Match as a Service. The first, Skills AI Copilot, focuses on identifying the skills needed in the world today and how an organisation should design its skill framework. Skilling.Exchange provides learning content to employees. It aggregates and curates “the best of the content from the planet”, ranking and rating it for relevance, said Jain. Continuum.Exchange provides a continuous, forward-looking view of succession for every role and individual. It identifies potential growth paths for individuals (at least three opportunities) and potential successors for roles. “It is largely designed for leadership roles,” said Jain. Talent Map Live enables skill-based workforce planning, forecasting of talent needs, and likely other strategic planning related to the organisation’s human capital and Recruitment.Exchange is a “new age recruiting” platform focused on efficiency and candidate experience. Match as a Service is a matching engine that helps large organisations efficiently connect jobs with candidates or internal employees. Tech Underneath Jain said that they are not using LLMs. Instead, they have built their own proprietary model called the large graph model. “Our base technology is called LGM, in which we have 11 million sanitised skill graph nodes, which relate to each other, and cover some 127,000 primary skills across some 27 industries,” said Jain. He added that on top of it, the company has created powerful domain-intelligent search and match capabilities, business rules engines, and different kinds of operating logic. Speaking of the data model, he said that they manually sewed the graph model till 2014. From 2014 onwards, they automated many parts of it. “We put a lot of servers in the cloud in early 2014, and for the last 15 years, this particular technology has been completely scavenging every single data element from the web, whether it’s jobs, job descriptions, research papers, or various kinds of labour market sources.” He explained that through it, the system generates this continuous skill map, which is then created in the form of skill graphs, where every skill and the way of their adjacency is represented in the form of graphs. He said one of their solutions already tracks more than 16,000 companies and is directly linked to their websites. It includes every job posted there and the evolution of jobs. Growing Customer Base Jain shared that some of their long-standing customers include Cognizant and Tata Communications. “We’ve recently started working with Myntra and Digit Insurance.” Speaking of the impact, he said they have tremendously brought down the cost of sourcing by anywhere between 30% and 50% in companies. “The time to recruit has definitely come down by 20% to 40%, depending on how much of our workflows companies have actually used,” he added. Citing an example, he shared that in one of the companies, there was a heavy reliance on external hiring—70% of roles were filled from outside and only 30% internally. Their solution helped reverse this ratio. “Now 70% can be fulfilled internally, and only for 30% you have to look outside. That is the best impact that we have.” Team Size and Future Roadmap Right now, the company has 100 people and is looking to add another 75–80 to the team. “Until two years ago, we were largely focused on the Indian market. But since last year, we have seen significant growth for us in Europe and the US markets. The team is rapidly growing,” Jain said. Between 2014 and 2016, the company secured $13 million in Series A funding and is now profitable. Speaking of the future roadmap, he said that they initially focused on solving demand-side problems — primarily from the enterprise’s perspective — and have now shifted towards addressing supply-side challenges in the talent ecosystem. He hinted that the company is going to launch new products soon. [Note: A previous version of this article mentioned a client’s name, which has since been removed following a request by the company.]
“Now 70% [hiring needs] can be fulfilled internally, and only for 30% you’ll have to look outside. That is the best impact that we have.”
Tech is moving fast, and companies are finding it hard to keep their teams upskilled. At the same time, managing the cost of talent is equally challenging. This is the problem Spire.ai is solving.
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.