CoCubes: Helping Students Connect the Next Dot in Their Career

CoCubes has effectively leveraged the power of mobile and internet technology to connect campuses from across the country to companies who hire and engage freshers from campuses. This platform helps the companies identify, engage, source, assess and bring talent on-board from campuses with just a few clicks. Companies are comfortable with the technology employed by CoCubes because it comes with strong campus knowledge from the team and a reach to authenticated students from over 2000 colleges across the country with an ability to bring any college online.

Founded by Harpreet Grover and Vibhore Goyal, CoCubes has now evolved to a 100 member strong team. Harpreet envisions building a framework to help students connect all the dots to build a successful career. He previously worked with Inductis, a management consulting firm, advising Fortune 500 clients in the financial services domain by using data analytics. The other co-founder, Vibhore, worked at Microsoft Research Centre filing six patents in his brief stint of 18 months. He was also the founding member at Babajob, a highly popular web 2.0 based platform which helps low-skilled people get jobs. These two had met at IIT-B for the dual-degree program and had become close friends. The management team also includes Amanjeet Saluja, President, who brings over 12 years of rich experience with him including setting up processes and building business units from scratch. He also ran a USD 20 Million product line at Altisource (a spin off from Ocwen Asset Management).

With the team all set, they worked a lot on their platform. The online platform acts as a technology solution for the college, enabling it to manage and communicate from the placement office, get access to job posts from over 400 companies who hire through CoCubes and to a whole suite of employability initiatives as well. This includes a year-long learning plan across career paths like IT jobs, Govt. jobs, and higher education through mock tests. The students can improve upon their communication skills and knowledge via online learning tools and on their mobile through SMS across 59 modules with preparatory tips.

“We have seen phenomenal growth, averaging at 525% YoY ever since we started off! We have to admit that since the process was traditionally offline, we had to take more effort in convincing both corporates and colleges to use our platform. The benefits of technology, however, are immense and cannot go unseen. Once corporates saw that they could hire and engage with a few clicks where they otherwise spent quality time, money and effort, they embraced this,” says Harpreet. Their solution allows firms to recruit a range of individuals, from as few as 5 people to as many as 5,000.

Colleges have also benefited from the technology employed by CoCubes. Premier institutes like SRM University and SASTRA have subscribed exclusively to their technology platform to manage placements. Other institutes (over 300 of them) have subscribed to the full solution that assists them in increasing the employment and overall employability of their students.

They have developed their business model in a way that makes hiring free for companies, while colleges pay an annual fee of INR 1000 per final year student (INR 1500 per pre-final year student) to enroll as a partner college. It is mandatory for the entire college to enroll. This model has been prepared keeping the following points in light:

1. The total ‘good jobs’ in the market are ~1.5L (NASSCOM survey) for fresh engineers and more than a million kids graduate every year from engineering colleges. So that would mean, a corporate can afford to be choosy about who they want to hire, in which case, they shouldn’t actually pay to hire. They may pay to hire a more trained resource but not someone with generic engineering skills (freshers).

2. The same corporates are being squeezed on operating margin pressures and want to reduce costs.

3. A large number of colleges have mushroomed in the country. They charge hefty fees from students and thus operate on a high profit margin. These colleges have the money to spend but are unable to find a trustworthy way to do so.

An additional revenue stream, though a relatively small fraction, comes from corporates who subscribe to their “engagement solution”. Corporates pay a fixed annual subscription fee for engaging with over 800,000 students on the platform. We have 12 engagement partners including Cognizant, Accenture, MindTree, et al. CoCubes has spread its wings to every Tier 2 and Tier 3 city by connecting to remotely located colleges and their students. Four of the Top 10 Software companies recruit through CoCubes.

CoCubes won a good number of awards in the last couple of years. It was recognized by NASSCOM as one of India’s Top 10 Emerging Companies in 2010. In 2011, it won the RASBIC Award for Innovation in Recruitment, the TiE-Lumis Entrepreneurial Excellence Award and the Manthan South Asia Award for Digital Inclusion. More recently, they were awarded the EMPI- Indian Express India Innovation Award, 2012 by the Dy. Chairman of the Planning Commission of India, Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Businessworld recognized CoCubes as one of India’s 25 hottest young entrepreneurs and Inc. India featured them on their cover issue.

Team CoCubes seems all tanked up, visit them here.

CoCubes recently acquired SQuotient Analyzers, learn more about it here.