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Trevo aggregated tourist and chartered buses in Delhi-NCR. Trevo , a bus aggregation startup based in the national capital region, has shut shop after operating for barely a month. Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain, two of Trevo’s co-founders, said the company has stopped operations but refused to disclose more information. “We have halted our operations. We are not running the app now,” Vij said. Trevo was  launched  in early October by IIT and IIM alumni Mayank Jain, Raghav Jain and Vij. The trio had last year launched TalentPad.com, a technology recruitment marketplace that shut shop in August. Mayank and Raghav had previously formed a social referral startup called Zobtree that was also shut down. Raghav Jain and Vij refused to say whether they plan to re-launch Trevo. “While we are not operational on the Trevo app now, we haven’t completely shut down,” said Jain. “We are… figuring out what’s next. We will have some clarity on our next move in a couple of weeks’ time.”
The duo also declined to disclose the reasons behind the startup’s closure. However, a person familiar with the development said the company was struggling due to lack of funds. “With a high cash burn rate, they couldn’t survive for more than a month and eventually shut down operations around Diwali,” the person said. Trevo aggregated tourist and chartered buses in Delhi-NCR. At the launch, Trevo claimed to have offered rides to about 2,000 passengers every day at Rs 5 per kilometre. The company had plans to cover 25,000 passengers across 100 routes in Delhi-NCR by the end of this year and was reportedly scouting for Series A funding of up to $10 million. Trevo launched operations in Gurgaon with a team of 15, according to one of its employee’s LinkedIn profile. According to Mayank Jain, all employees of TalentPad had been absorbed into Trevo. When asked about the fate of Trevo employees, both Raghav Jain and Vij refused to comment. TalentPad, formerly known as Talent Auction, was a curated marketplace for technology recruitment based out of Bangalore. The company, while closing its operations in August, attributed the move to its inability to figure out a scalable business model. “One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that,” it said in a blog post at the time of shutting down. Before launching their ventures, Mayank was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Smile Group. Raghav was an equity research analyst at JP Morgan while Vij was a quantitative analyst at Morgan Stanley. TalentPad had raised an undisclosed sum in its first round of institutional funding from Helion Venture Partners in October last year. In May this year, TalentPad had acquired OptimizedBits, a tech recruitment platform, for an undisclosed amount.


Exclusive: Bus pooling startup Trevo shuts operations

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Mayank Jain
The co-founders of TalentPad.com , a technology recruitment marketplace that shut shop in August, have started a bus pooling app for intra-city travel. Christened Trevo, the app will aggregate tourist and chartered buses starting with Gurgaon, said Mayank Jain, CEO of Trevo. All employees of the Helion Venture Partners-backed TalentPad have been absorbed into Trevo, Jain told Techcircle.in. Nikhil Vij
TalentPad was founded by IIT and IIM alumni Jain, Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain last year. Mayank and Raghav had previously formed the now defunct startup Zobtree. Before that, Mayank was an entrepreneur In residence at Smile Group. Raghav was an equity research analyst at JP while Vij was a quantitative analyst at Morgan Stanley. TalentPad closed operations in August owing to its inability to figure out a scalable business model. Raghav Jain
âWith a very heavy heart, we wish to inform you that we at TalentPad are shutting our operations effective immediately. One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that,â the blog post read,â as per a blog post on the TalentPad website. Talentpad required candidates to submit a detailed profile for approval. Once the TalentPad team evaluated the candidature, handpicked candidates were asked to participate in a week-long auction process called Talent Fair, where employers compete to hand interview offers online. Post that, the candidate could decides where to be interviewed and the interview process would start. In May, TalentPad had acquired OptimizedBits, a tech recruitment platform, for an undisclosed amount. Bus pooling is a relatively new concept in India. Last month, Ola launched its shuttle bus services in Bangalore and Gurgaon with about 500 shuttles. To be updatedâ¦


TalentPad co-founders venture into bus pooling

[Lessons Learned] 2015-09-30T10:37:28+00:00 Insights No Comment
Talentpad which raised funding from Helion shutdown  a few months back. Founder, Mayank Jain in the spirit of ‘paying it forward’ shares great insights behind the story. These insights are immensely useful not just for founders in recruitment space, but for the ones doing B2B businesses as well. Read on. One-line Reason
Our inability to figure out a scalable solution, which addresses a large enough market in India. Target Market
To begin with, let me start by defining our target market, we were targeting the white-collar private sector permanent job market in India. Out of the total working population of ~600mn, our TG was 1%+ of that, around 7mn. I know this might sound surprising, but it’s true. The rest of the workers are either blue or grey collar workers, or working in either public sector, or in agriculture. So, the total recruitment market (defined above) is ~$1bn, out of which the share of the recruiters / consultants is ~$600mn, and the share of job-boards is ~$125mn, Naukri being the leader with ~$60mn in revenues. We had intended to take some market share away from both of the above, so our TAM was ~$725mn. Our Premise
So, when we started we started with the premise that existing marketplaces (like Naukri, TimesJobs etc. ) are fairly inefficient, in my mind they’re a directory, directory of CVs, directory of jobs. And today no one wants a directory, neither the candidate nor the employers, everybody wants a customised and highly relevant list, which is also small in size. We said, let’s take a segment of the market, which is large enough, but let’s serve it well, instead of just being a directory. When I say serve well, one thing we wanted to do was improve the ‘MATCHING‘, as we believed there is no perfect candidate or job, it’s all about marrying the right candidate with the right opportunity / company. We had intended to do that using data science, technology, by capturing organised data sets on both sides i.e. CV and job, and using data science / rules to do the matching, which’ll of course improve with time as more data gets fed into the machine. Learnings as we went along
However on our journey, as we got to understand the market better, following is what we realized. The consultant’s $600mn market is further a sum of three sub-markets:
1. Senior Management (~$100mn): this sub-market works on trust, relationships, confidentiality, basically lack of transparency. And over 90% market share in this segment belongs to the exec. search firms. Couldn’t figure a way to fix this using tech. 2. Junior / Mid Management (<$300mn): what we realized is that the key thing employers look for in this sub-market, while making a hire, was the probability of the hire turning out to be a good manager. Because this is the point where an individual is transitioning from an individual contributor role to a managerial one, thus probability of being a good manager was the key. And domain knowledge becomes a hygiene rather than an acceptance parameter. While there are a couple of psychometric assessment companies out there to solve this problem, but they’ve their own type 1 and type 2 errors. Also, what we understood was that presently, an interviewer largely tries to de-construct a person’s past work experience, basically CV, and understands that in more detail, asks him examples of specific instances where he showed certain traits, in an in-person meeting to gauge whether he or she’ll be a good manager or not. This is largely intuition along with some supporting facts. Again, we thought if we could try capturing the details asked in an in-person interview and build into the person’s CV, we could solve this problem to some extent, maybe reduce the duration of the interview, or reduce the number of interviews. But this seemed to be a very very hard problem to solve, and this would require to be done for each role, sub-role and skill, not to mention that the sub-market size is less. 3. Junior / Entry Level (>$200mn): In this sub-market, what we figured was that the one-thing required to crack this was figuring a scalable way to up-skill talent, then assess talent and then finally place him/her. Roughly 50% of this sub-market comes from three industries i.e. IT/ITeS, BFSI and Retail, and that’s how it works with them, they largely work with recruiters / consultants, in some case provide the training material to these consultants, for them to find people, train them over a period which can range from 3 to 6 months, post which assess them, post which the good ones get hired by the employers. In IT/ITeS the training part happens in-house owing to the mismatch of supply and demand. Over 1mn engineers graduate every year, while the industry hires ~0.2mn every year in this segment, 90% of which happens on-campus. The demand supply gap because ~25% of these graduates are deemed employable, not talking about quality hires. Coming on to the ‘Assessing’ part, while there is a scalable way to assess tech. skills, and HackerRank is the leader in this, but for non-tech skills this is a very hard problem, one that has not been solved with accuracy globally. We tried hard to solve this part, but couldn’t figure out a scalable solution to assess most of non-tech skills, while we could for some. Plus, in my mind this is a different and an independent business altogether (B2B SaaS), than what we were doing, which does not mean we couldn’t get into this, but our inability to figure for most non-tech skills led us to take this decision, not to mention the part to scale up-skilling / training, which is also a complete business in itself (which is why I think LinkedIn made a huge bet on Lynda). Conclusion
So, in my mind the above three sub-markets are completely different to each others, and practically need three different businesses to serve these well, except that individually size of each sub-market is less. Coupled with our inability to figure out a scalable solution, we decided to discontinue. Of course there are generic solutions, which will apply for all the above three sub-markets,  like providing access to the directory, where Naukri etc. are playing, and it’s hard to disrupt them unless you’ve a solid differentiation, which we could not figure out. We could have taken the path of a tech-enabled recruiter and scaled the business to a $25-30mn revenue business over the next 5 years, however that did not match with our aspirations, and we decided to take the hard call rather than dragging on. Also, when I say aspirations, it’s more to do with our unwillingness to run a service business. Then we tried to figure out an adjacent market in recruitment space that we could possibly attack like temp. placement market, part time job market, freelance, intern, contract hire, up-skilling market and so on. While temp. placement market by definition asset-heavy and hard to scale using tech., the size of the part time, intern, contract hire market was very small in India (<$50mn), on the other hand the freelance market was overcrowded, and in some ways a different market altogether with different dynamics, which is when we decided to not limit ourselves to above and explore other ideas / markets as well. As a summary, my view is the following:
Extremely hard to replace horizontal marketplaces, like Naukri / LinkedIn, unless there is a solid value prop. which is defensible (which we could not find for a large enough market)
With vertical marketplaces like IIMJobs, HasGeek etc. , there is a market size issue in India, so will have to expand globally to build a large business
Opportunity to build an assessment business, for non-tech skills, if you can figure a scalable way to do so. Can address the blue collar market too if you figure that. Proud of
However, that being said, in many ways we succeeded, we did figure out a scalable solution to address a segment of the market i.e. skill workers. We scaled the business to $1mn+ in revenues, with 1500+ clients signed up, 60,000+ tech. candidates signed up, built a stellar team, a team I’m really proud of, a team who believed in us in spite of this failure, team that decided to work together for our present venture. We also got a chance to learn from marquee investors like Helion, made a great friend i.e. Ritesh who was on our board, all of this in 18 months. We succeeded in a lot of aspects pertaining to execution, in areas like marketing, sales, client management, product, hiring great folks etc. What next
Now we’ve started our next journey (like we promised), have come out wiser and stronger, and in takes me great pride to announce our next venture i.e. Trevo , it’s a venture in the intra-city bus-pooling space, more details soon in a blog post. [You can email Mayank at mayank@trevoapp.com . The article has been reproduced from his Quora response. ]
2015-09-30T10:37:28+00:00
Guest AuthorInsightsinsights,talentpad
Talentpad which raised funding from Helion shutdown a few months back. Founder, Mayank Jain in the spirit of 'paying it forward' shares great insights behind the story. These insights are immensely useful not just for founders in recruitment space, but for the ones doing B2B businesses as well.Read on.One-line ReasonOur inability... Guest AuthorAuthorpress@pluggd.inContributorThe article has been contributed by guest author. If you would like to share your opinion/insights/write a guest post, please get in touch [ashish at nextbigwhat.com]NextBigWhat


Why Talentpad Shutdown? [Lessons Learned]

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Online recruitment start-up TalentPad decided to shut shop this month after being in business for barely 18 months. The start-up raised an undisclosed amount from Helion Venture Partners in 2014, acquired technology recruitment platform OptimizedBits and clocked more than $1 million in revenue in its lifetime, but it wasn’t quite enough to help it survive. In June, Hyderabad Angels-backed WhistleTalk, a social referral platform for hiring, closed down as well. TalentPad and WhistleTalk are among the at least 35 online ventures that include Hiree, HackerRank, Talview, LetsIntern and Belong, striving to make a dent in India’s $1-billion-a-year recruitment market with profuse use of technology in sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates. These new-age firms claim to streamline the hiring process for recruiters with diligently crafted algorithms, tools and tests that throw up a set of handpicked candidates, presumably best fitted for the job, after perusing their social, professional and academic background. The upside for recruiters: saving the labour of manually sifting through resumes and an efficient, technology-driven sourcing and screening of candidates. For instance, Hiree allows only an active jobseeker to list on the portal, thus ensuring that recruiters do not spend time in connecting with disinterested candidates. HackerRank conducts hackathons and online tests for recruiters to screen candidates, while Talview offers solutions for conducting video interviews on the go. In the process, these fledgling recruitment firms have locked horns with the so-called unicorns such as Naukri, Shine, LinkedIn and Monster, which are sitting on millions of resumes and tens of thousands of customers across industry segments, which is not the case with these start-ups yet. “The online recruitment start-ups are trying to solve certain problems that job boards like us are not focused on, like selection and shortlisting,” said Amit Garg, executive director, digital at HT Media Ltd, which owns Shine.com and publishes Mint. “Many of these start-ups will scale up to be a decent business but they won’t give us a real fight unless they have as big a database, enough manpower and resources for driving sales and enough investment.”
Naukri claims to have about 60,000 corporate customers and about 40 million registered users, of whom about 18 million are active on the site at any given time. In comparison, Hiree has partnered with 550 firms. HackerRank claims to have more than one million coders, though not all of them are job seekers. Most have succeeded in wooing technology product firms and start-ups, which recruit mainly to fill niche roles. They are yet to sign up bulk recruiters in the banking, financial services and insurance, retail, information technology (IT) services and telecom segments, limiting their growth, a case in point being TalentPad. “TalentPad’s algorithm was working very well for the technology product segment, but it was hard to scale the approach to other segments such as insurance, retail, financial services or BPO (business process outsourcing,” said Ritesh Banglani, partner at Helion Venture Partners. “It was a case of not finding a product market fit.”
Two of the most valuable homegrown start-ups, InMobi and Ola, employ about 900 and 6,000 people, respectively. In comparison, at IT services firm Infosys Ltd, the headcount increased by about 3,300 employees in the quarter ended June, while at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, the number of new hirees was about 5,300. Also, most of these recruitment start-ups target job seekers with two to five years’ work experience, catering mostly to the lateral hiring segment. Naukri claims about one-third of the lateral hiring by large firms still happen through the portal even as the company is spending heavily on technology. “We are investing serious money towards technology and to improve our product. About 30-40% of lateral hiring done by most large firms is via Naukri,” said Hitesh Oberoi, managing director and chief executive at Info Edge India Ltd, the company which owns Naukri.com. “A better-looking site is not technology and technology cannot be a differentiator, it is only an enabler,” said Oberoi, adding that the company is also open to acquisitions. Branching out to multiple industries thus becomes the key to survive in a highly competitive market. Else, the companies should choose a particular vertical and go global with the offering, experts say. “Most hiring through these firms happens for junior and mid-junior level. But the base will not be small if they can expand beyond the product start-ups in the next two to three years to pharma, FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) and banking,” said Rutvik Doshi, director at Inventus Capital Partners. One challenge for the start-ups is that most bulk hirers are looking to outsource the entire recruitment process instead of particular functions. It also becomes difficult to standardize the recruitment process as every company wants to stick to its own set of assessment guidelines, said Helion’s Banglani. Consequently, most of these start-ups are adding more firepower to their arsenal, offering additional services as well as expanding to categories beyond technology products companies. According to Manjunath Talwar, founder and chief executive at Hiree, the company would expand to tap other categories such as manufacturing, banking, financial services and insurance, besides adding multiple layers of service such as assessment tools on top of the sourcing services. Hiree and HackerRank have also adopted an annual subscription-based payment model to ensure a steady stream of revenue. Zishaan Hayath, angel investor and co-founder of online prep platform Toppr.com, points out that there is a need for niche hiring platforms, but none of the newer recruitment platforms have been able to create a product that is solving the need of tech start-ups. As a result, start-ups end up hiring from recruitment agents, employee referrals, and their own network. “Recruitment start-ups here have not been able to crack the model completely. The conversions were low and the retention of the employees that came via these platforms was a challenge,” said Hayath. For him, campus recruitment and his own network are the best channels for sourcing talent. (The story was first published on livemint.com )
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Recruitment start-ups on a tech drive to make a dent in jobs market

Online recruitment platform TalentPad to shutdown
By Vivek Pai on August 6, 2015
August 6, 2015
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TalentPad (previously TalentAuction), a talent fair marketplace for tech companies, is shutting down its operations, the company informed through a blog post . According to the startup the shutdown results from unable to figure out a scalable business model. Post shutdown, new users will be unable to sign up on the platform. Candidates already in the process of interviewing will still have their interviews coordinated. If a candidate’s profile was only approved and not yet live, it won’t be going live anymore. Profiles which are pending approval will also not be verified. The company mentions that to maintain privacy, all user profiles will be permanently deleted by the 30th of September. As for employers, the company mentions that it will commit to its guarantee of refunding employers if candidates quit within 90 days. Employers can also continue to give interview offers to candidates that have live profiles, however, it’s not clear how long the company plans to continue this. In all likelihood the site will be permanently shut down on the 30th of September. Advertisement
OptimizedBits acquisition: In May, TalentPad had acquihired the tech recruitment platform OptimizedBits for an undisclosed sum. The entire team of OptimizedBits, including the cofounders, were to move to TalentPad and operate out of TalentPad’s Delhi office. At the time, the company mentioned the acquisition would help create a bigger scale curated marketplace for tech recruiters as well as expand its market share. Funding: TalentPad had raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Helion Ventures in October last year. The company said then that it would use the funds raised to increase its marketing efforts and strengthen its management team. Launched in February 2014, the Delhi-based startup differentiated from traditional job portals by providing an engagement model focusing on recruitment problem from the candidate side rather than the recruiter side. The service was free for job seeking candidates, while companies had to pay a percentage of a hired employee’s gross income as fee to the startup. 0


Online recruitment platform TalentPad to shutdown

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Name	Title	Status
Raghav Jain	Founder	Current
Nikhil Vij	Founder	Current
Mayank Jain	Chief Executive Officer	Former

Name	Raghav Jain	Nikhil Vij	Mayank Jain
Work History
Title	Founder	Founder	Chief Executive Officer
Status	Current	Current	Former

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