Cloud-interviewing firm Karat sees Indian candidates setting the bar

India has six of the top 20 cities hiring software developers worldwide, next only to the US, says an internal report by interviewing cloud platform Karat. The Seattle-based company has seen exponential growth in its Indian business and plans to significantly increase investments in the country.

“The dynamic has really shifted where all of our clients are seeing India as not just a cost advantage centre but as a place to innovate, get the best talent, and oftentimes the India interviews set the bar for the rest of the world. Suppose we take a GCC (global in-house centres or captives) like B NY Mellon or Walmart or Amazon, we will interview candidates everywhere for them. But the Indian candidates are setting the bar for the pace and the quality of talent for everywhere else in the world,” Mohit Bhende, the CEO and Co-founder of Karat said.

Karat offers a data-enabled technology platform and combines it with human interviewers. It conducts technical interviews on behalf of its customers which include names such as Walmart, Bank of America, CitiBank, and Amazon.

The India-born entrepreneur founded Karat eight years ago after leaving his job as a Senior Director for Microsoft XBOX. According to him, he wanted to solve three very specific problems in the hiring process of engineers - skills evaluation, excessive time spent in the hiring process, and chances of bias in traditional hiring.

Karat has conducted over 300,000 interviews till now. One out of every five interviews is being done in India, while the company has tripled its business in the country last year. Although the company doesn’t disclose the number of interviewers it has, it currently can do more than 60,000 interviews a month.

The report on the top 20 cities for software developer hiring says recruiter efficiency in India is at a premium, due to the unique mix of volume and high performance, as employers sift through a high volume of qualified applicants to identify top candidates. To combat this, it says, talent leaders across India are increasing their investments in HR tech and recruiting vendors.

Bhende says “There is such a big demand-supply imbalance for engineering talent that organizations are spending up to 20 per cent of their time interviewing. On the other hand, interviewees need to have a fair, flexible, unbiased experience. We interview candidates for our customers and we tell them to look at the 100 candidates that applied for this job, here are the two best candidates for the job. We have saved them a lot of time and made their process more consistent.”

The company calls itself an interviewing cloud, with a global network of engineers, who are equipped with 40 hours of training to become “professional interviewers.” Interviewees can rate these interviewers.

Not only that, Karat allows the candidates to ask for another chance if an interview doesn’t go well. The flexibility is also reflected in the day and time of the interview, which can be based on the preference of the candidate. Over 60 per cent of candidates in India are interviewing on Saturdays and Sundays.

“If you are a customer of a hotel, and you didn't have a good experience, they will give you a free night. But if you're a customer of a hiring process today, it's very one-sided. And so companies use us to say actually, we need to have a brand that treats job candidates like a customer. Think job candidate as the customer,” the CEO said.

He added that most of the customers were increasingly focusing on expansion in the Indian market. While doing so, they want to standardize the bar at the global level. Therefore many of the companies that use Karat aren't just trying to hire talent in India and demand Indian hires to be better or on par with everywhere else.

Bhende also explained that the platform uses data collected during “thousands of interviews” and provides an integrated service. “Our platform creates the interview questions; we validate the interview results with the client. And so we work with our clients on the interview formats.”

When asked about changing trends in tech sector hiring, Bhende said the data collected by Karat was very clear that the engineering talent was flowing out of tech. Other sectors energy, healthcare, banking, and aviation are trying to catch more and more software talent.  

Bhende believes that the non-tech large multinationals have a two-year window to hire as many engineers as they can.

“According to Karat’s score, the quality of hire going to crypto or FinTech companies was seven times higher than the quality of talent going to banks a year ago. The end carat score of a FinTech company was seven times higher than a bank a year ago. But there's a huge redistribution of talent happening,” he emphasised. The CEO said even as we might read about layoffs at big techs, all of the laid-off employees are finding jobs. “I think there will be plenty of jobs, they just have to look beyond the bubble of the traditional technology sector.

Going ahead, the company sees a business opportunity in coaching these clients on how to conduct those interviews along with increasing its interview hubs to more locations.