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HomeSuccess StorySCIKEY Success Story: Talent & Technolgy Sourcing made Easier

SCIKEY Success Story: Talent & Technolgy Sourcing made Easier

SCIKEY Success Story 

SCIKEY Success story Akshay Sharma, Alok Kumar and Karunjit Kumar Dhir, the founders of SCIKEY had to go through the painful experience of dealing with multiple vendors and service providers for sourcing the required talent or even the right technology solutions & providers. Thereby leading them to start SCIKEY.  

SCIKEY is a marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. On SCIKEY’s platform, the entire transaction – right from talent & technology sourcing to delivery happens online. The Asia HR Management industry is anticipated to be USD 40 Billion by 2027 growing @ CAGR of 11.7% (Grand View Research, Feb 2020).

SCIKEY.ai – Company Highlights

  • Startup Name-SCIKEY.ai
  • Co-founders-Akshay Sharma, Alok Kumar, Karunjit Kumar Dhir
  • Founding Year-2016
  • Headquarters-Pune
  • Sector-HR Tech
  • Website-scikey.ai

SCIKEY – About

SCIKEY is a marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. It is essentially, how one may look up to it like the Amazon for talent & technology solutions with a touch of LinkedIn. SCIKEY is a digital platform for jobs, work & business solutions, supported by a Professional Network and an integrated Services Ecosystem. It aims to organize the talent & technology solutions marketplace online.

SCIKEY – Vision, Mission and Core Belief

SCIKEY’s Vision is to be the world’s most trusted company for providing customer-centric solutions by inspiring  people, collabration & performance.

SCIKEY’s Mission is to improve the lives of the people and enable businesses across the world by offering them  best quality, value, insights & experience; through its marketplace network for talent & technology solutions. SCIKEY continues to invest in research & technology to fuel innovation and making people as well as businesses more productive, thereby becoming their trusted partner in this hyper-connected world.

Core belief: SCIKEY’s core values of Trust, Transparency & Excellence are the foundation of all the relationships, making those delightful and sustainable.

SCIKEY – Market/Industry Details

The global talent management software market size was valued at USD 6.26 billion in 2015 and is expected to witness a significant growth owing to its growing application scope in almost all the human capital-centric industries. The industry is undergoing a facelift with many new technologies disrupting the workforce management in organizations, of which cloud and data analytics are the most prominent ones.

A recent report published by McKinsey indicates that the digital talent marketplaces driving the so  called “gig economy” could play a significant role in increasing global GDP by $2.7 Trillion by 2025.

Market Details:

  • Total addressable market: $100 bn +
  • Serviceable Available Market: $1 bn +
  • Serviceable Obtainable Market: $100 mn +

The geographical split of SCIKEY’s market is as follow:

  • India – 10%
  • North America – 30%
  • Europe – 20%
  • Asia (minus India) – 40%

HR Tech industry:

Asia HR Management industry is anticipated to be USD 40 Billion by 2027 growing @  CAGR – 11.7% (Grand View Research, Feb 2020)

Global HR Tech Marketplace  – USD 400 Billion  (Deloitte Reports)

HR Tech Market Size In Asia – USD 9 Billion (Grand View Research, Feb 2020)

Robotics / AI Based HR Tech Market – USD 6 Billion (People Matters)

Estimated Savings for Indian Firms by using HR Tech – USD 600 Million Annually (People Matters)

SCIKEY – Founders and Team

Alok Kumar is the founder of SCIKEY. Akshay Sharma and Karunjit Kumar Dhir are the Co-founders of SCIKEY.

SCIKEY is the brain child of Alok Kumar. Shriram & Akshay had met & worked with Alok as a part of his team, before Alok moved out to build SCIKEY. Interestingly, Karunjit had first met Alok in 2007, when he was helping Alok as his customer to setup their offshore captive in India.

SCIKEY’s core team’s tasks –

Alok Kumar – Founder

Akshay Sharma– the owner of R&D & works closely with Alok & Karun on key business boosters like research, automation, growth hacking etc.,

Karunjit Kumar Dhir – owner for the branding, business development, revenue growth & global expansion, investors & fundraising, Finance

Shriram Viswanathan– owner for SCIKEY’s talent enablement, assessments, awards, ranking etc.,

SCIKEY – Work Culture and Hiring Funda

SCIKEY’s work culture is built around the core values of trust, transparency & excellence leading to mutual respect, happiness & sustainability.

SCIKEY’s hiring funda has an interesting framework, named ‘DISCO Framework’

D – Dependability (can I just talk to you once & be assured the job is done without any follow-ups or even better can you pro-actively get the job done?)

I – Integrity & Ethics (how much can I trust you & be assured that you will always do the right thing even when no one is watching you?)

SCIKEY – Ideation and How it Started

The Founders & Team section of the post already covered the part on how the Core team of SCIKEY was formed. Let’s see what else it took to start SCIKEY.

Even, other peers from the industry acknowledged the problem, but no one was trying to solve it with an effective workable solution. So most of the ideation happened internally. They collected feedback from the CXOs or top leaders in the industries who were directly responsible for building and running profitable companies of different shapes & sizes (right from funded start-ups to global fortune MNCs). This helped the SCIKEY team to learn the root-cause of the problem and by connecting the dots from personal experience + Inputs from leaders, they decided to build SCIKEY! A robust platform and a business model that can be scaled to service the needs of a global audience.

SCIKEY – Products/Services and USP

The way this world moved from offline to online banking, offline retail to e-commerce, offline taxis to e-hailing and more. SCIKEY also started with taking the entire experience of sourcing talent & technology solutions online.

On SCIKEY’s platform, the entire transaction – right from talent & technology sourcing to delivery happens online. It aims to organize the talent & technology solutions marketplace online.

SCIKEY is primarily automating most of the mechanical things but going big on the human touch. It’s about helping the generally overloaded talent & technology sourcing teams, with a solution that eases their life and helps them add real value to the business by being a “business partner” in its true sense. It is about streamlining the process end-to-end (that is otherwise largely fragmented) not only to achieve exceptional business outcomes, but also offering a great user experience, that is missing generally.

Customers now expect a great Experience (Personalized), Convenience (Anywhere & Real-time access), Value (Ongoing), Choices (Faster Fulfilment) & Insights (that impact Business Outcomes). And this is where SCIKEY helps!

SCIKEY offers a digital, connected & intuitive experience over a secure cloud-based platform for best outcomes & productivity, leveraging technology, Crowdsourcing (Onsite, Offshore, Remote),  Community & Automation to deliver best of the solution and insights that impact business outcomes.

Research & IP Focus – Patent filed for the SCIKEY MindMatch algorithm & research presented at the United Nations(Geneva) twice. Unique “Managed Marketplace” business model that leverages advanced tech enabled crowd-sourcing of talent & technology solutions in a single online platform making it highly elastic, scalable & cost-efficient.

Solid founding team with decades of proven industry leadership experience selling large solutions &  building high-growth business in multiple global markets from scratch; and prior experience of working together.

Deep domain as well as technical expertise.

Astute focus on unit economics and hence a cash-positive business already.

SCIKEY – Name, Tagline and Logo

SCIKEY emerged from the combination of two important words that form the generis of the team’s approach behind building this platform 

Scientific (backed by research & data) + Key (of crucial importance) = SCIKEY

“We have always seen SCIKEY as a solution to some of the ‘key’ problems of our potential  customers and we genuinely believe in the power of scientific input(data) in this hyper-connected world that we live in. and, that is how we decided to go with Sci + Key = SCIKEY” Says the team

It’s not only the SCIKEY name that has deep meaning and relevance but the colors represented in the SCIKEY logo also has notions behind it.

Colors convey emotions & evoke thoughts. The 6 colors in the SCIKEY’s logo convey the emotions of the brand. It represents the possibility of looking at a problem in 6 different ways to evaluate multiple potential solutions as well as personalities coming together to solve the problem.

Blue – A color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes  trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Green – Resembling nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money.

Yellow – The most luminous of all the colors of the spectrum. It’s the color of happiness, and optimism, of enlightenment and creativity, sunshine and spring.

Orange – It combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.

Red – A color of passion and adventure.

Grey – In color psychology, grey represents neutrality and balance.

SCIKEY – Business Model and Revenue Model

SCIKEY operates mainly on a SaaS model. SCIKEY’s revenue model is based on –

Transaction Fee – 15-30% of the sale value from the marketplace network

Micro-payments – $10 – $200 for various features, add-ons, reports, assessments monetized from its network

Subscription – for some of the ‘ABC-as-a-Service’ components & certain Premium Features for buyers as well as sellers on the platform

Managed Services & Consulting – especially for the Offshore & Remote Work solutions plus other  premium offerings

SCIKEY – Startup Launch and Customer Acquisition

Since beginning, SCIKEY was a research focused company. The team was already working with various professionals, businesses, institutions as well as universities/colleges on multiple research projects as well as pilots for some of the components of the platform. At start, it was not the same full-fledged platform like what one can see today, it was more of independent pieces or modules; largely to gather research data as well as user feedback.

For acquiring the first 100 customers , the team relied heavily upon customer referrals and LinkedIn. SCIKEY hasn’t been spending huge money on growth hacking as yet.

“We are a team that firmly believes in achieving an organic growth (even if it is slower initially) fueled by the thought leadership & brand authority as against burning big bucks to get quick hype. A quick hype is directly proportional to the burn-rate and tapers down as soon as the money fades away” added Akshay.

SCIKEY majorly focused on customer retention and repeat users. All they did was –

Listening to customers feedback, to incorporate it back in improving the product

Keeping its paid user acquisition burn to a minimum or zero

Continuously working towards improving the quality of experience & outcomes the customers/ users get from SCIKEY; as that makes us cash positive as well as sustainable.  

SCIKEY founders are a big fan of frugal innovation & Zero cost marketing.

To promote this idea. SCIKEY did a short ad film.

 

SCIKEY also acknowledged women leaders who broke the metaphorical glass ceiling, the society odds and has taken the lead in their own way. SCIKEY interviewed various women leaders to share their personal stories, how they overcame the gender challenges & despite of so many odds, how they succeeded to become what they are today.

SCIKEY Leader Speak Series

Under this initiative, SCIKEY interviewed Thought Leaders from the Business and HR space where they shared their perspective about the future of workforce, future of work, best strategies to lead the change & business. SCIKEY promoted these interviews on all of their social media channels, website & newsletters. Each leader further shared the interview in their own network. This has given SCIKEY a greater organic reach, trust, and credibility in decision makers fraternity