Ex-InMobi and NIT Jamshedpur graduates launch DoSelect, a collaborative hiring platform

There has been a growing demand for technical talent. In fact, the demand for programming talent has been consistently growing in the past couple of years. Bengaluru saw a rise of 44 per cent of new residents with technical talent early last year, compared to 31 per cent in San Francisco Bay Area. There has also been a growing number of people with technical skills moving to Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad. With these growing numbers, it has become essential for organisations to find the right talent.

DoSelect is one such platform. It is a recruitment tool that helps organisations not only discover, but also assess, the right kind of talent. Through DoSelect, companies evaluate talent across a range of technologies. It also allows teams to perform collaborative hiring across stages.

How Hackathons and CampusHash created DoSelect?

DoSelect was conceived by Iliyas Shirol, Rohit Tirkey and Sanket Saurav. The idea came to the trio while they were working on CampusHash, which was a technical workshops startup. This had a programme called 'InternHacks', through which they’d source interns to tech companies through college hackathons.

At this point in time, they got to speak to different companies of varying sizes. Iliyas says that they found that technical hiring was still broken. He adds that in almost all tech organisations, the hiring funnel inside the company, i.e., after candidates are sourced for a position, was highly manual and inefficient. After speaking to several people, the trio claims they became obsessed with the problem, and they knew they had to build a product to solve it.

The Skeleton

Iliyas says, "DoSelect helps companies automate and optimise their hiring funnel - right after they source candidates for a particular position to when they finally close a hire." According to him, the two main keywords of DoSelect are: technology independence and collaborative hiring. He further adds,"Companies can engage candidates with timed tests, online hackathons or a collaborative, one-on-one interaction with the team to understand them better."

He says the best part was that organisations can evaluate on any technology they need without having to set up anything. "Web technologies, big data, UI / UX, systems, networking - we've got them all," says Iliyas.All organisations need to do is define the problem description, select the frameworks, languages and operating system that the candidates can use to answer the questions. The candidates get a completely isolated cloud IDE with root access to solve the problems. The recruiters have flexibility about what and how they want to assess a candidate.

Iliyas says, "Previously, this entire process used to be manual - recruiters used to ask questions over email/chat; the candidates used to solve the problems and send the code back to the recruiters; the recruiters needed to download the code, run the live preview and give back the reviews. The more number of recruiters involved, the bigger the pain. With DoSelect, nobody needs to download anything." The platform currently works on subscription, with an indefinitely free plan for startups.

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The team believes that they have made significant breakthroughs in technology in order to achieve complete independence and seamless workflow for recruiters. Speaking of the traction so far, Iliyas says, "We had our 100th company sign-up within two weeks of our launch. The number of companies is growing at a rate of around 20 per cent per week with zero marketing budget."

Overview of the space

This space of collaborative hiring and a specific platform for hiring technical talent is picking up. Other platforms in this similar space are HackerRank, CodeEval and Codility. For these organisations, the idea is simple. They aim to remove or reduce all the possible bottlenecks that make hiring technical talent difficult and time-consuming.

The current market size of technical recruiting globally is around USD 5 billion, and it's growing at a pace of around 10 per cent every year. Last year, Bengaluru alone had 26,543 new additions to the technical skilled force, which according to industry experts is tad higher than Silicon Valley.

DoSelect