Start-ups offer a chance to network with industry leaders as mentors

Singapore-based Tigerhall, for instance, allows people to become members of an influential group and then depending on their career goals, matches them up with a suitable mentor

Looking for a job, learning a new skill or growing your business in a pandemic can be challenging. But the solution to the problem is coming from an unlikely source: start-ups.
 

Singapore-based Tigerhall, a learning and networking start-up, for instance, allows people to become members of an influential group and then depending on their career goals, matches them up with a suitable mentor. The platform currently has 45,000 members across Asia and 9,000 of them are in India.

Among the mentors, or “Thinkfluencers”, as Tigerhall calls them, are industry leaders from finance, consulting, film and media, including Rajan Anandan, managing director at Sequoia Capital, author Amish, and Raghu Raman, former president (risk, security and new ventures) of Reliance Industries.
 

For a monthly fee, members get digital access to podcasts, articles and invitations to private dinners and exclusive lunches with the mentors. In the pandemic, the in-person sessions are held over Zoom and users have a three-course meal delivered to them for virtual private dinners. A live streams’ feature to help them interact with mentors in real time is also in the offing.

This idea to democratise networking and give professionals, regardless of their family background or connections, access to influential leaders was conceived by Nellie Wartoft in 2019. The inspiration came from her experiences as a recruiter at Michael Page. “I was amazed at the insights the leaders helming the region’s biggest companies had acquired over the years from their successes and failures. But the access to these business leaders was usually kept within small elite circles," says Wartoft.

What Tigerhall is most determined to do is to upend the default practice of going to business schools to reboot one’s career — it wants to make learning directly from industry experts the norm.

Her ideas about replacing traditional learning platforms with more interactive ways of acquiring knowledge are part of a wider trend globally that values skills over college and now has been accelerated by the pandemic.

Former Bank of Baroda chairman Anil Khandelwal, who is a “thinkfluencer” with Tigerhall, says “multiple skills are now required to survive in a job and one needs to learn new skills every five years or so, otherwise the organisation may say goodbye to you.”

Tigerhall ran a campaign that offered one-on-one session with a mentor to those who lost their jobs in the pandemic to help them get their careers back on track. But mentors do not really create a job.

“When someone loses their job, anxiety can block their growth or just the ability to see the broader picture,” says Kandelwal.  “Someone like me, who has had so many years of experience in the banking industry, can help them discover alternative career paths.”

There is also the added benefit one derives from the social capital of a high-status mentor. Nearly 88 per cent of respondents in a survey conducted by US-based learning platform Springboard said they believed having a mentor could boost their chance of success.

Deepak Bhushanam, who worked with business software provider Freshworks in their marketing and sales but has been on a sabbatical for the past seven months, says the platform can give a foot in the door to someone looking for a job.  

“It is not often that you send a LinkedIn invite to a CEO and it gets accepted,” says Bhushanam. “But after meeting them face to face, I could connect with them on LinkedIn and I have been in touch with them since on email.” The mentors Bhushanam has connected with are advertising firm BBDO India CEO Suraja Kishore and Kellogg’s Asia Marketing Director for South East Asia Sanjib Bose, and he bounces marketing ideas off them over email.

In a way, Tigerhall is doing what is not done at universities. For example, a degree in sales. It’s a skill that is typically marginalised as “soft skills” or something that you “learn on the job”, says Wartoft. “There should be a proper way to learn how to sell — and learn this from the people who sell the best, not from a theoretic framework you can’t apply in practice,” she adds.

Several start-ups are trying to fill in this skills gap and help people find jobs. Notable among them is upGrad, which has seen a 50 per cent surge in new learners in the pandemic. But some are going a step further to offer job guarantees.

Springboard, which entered India last year with courses in data science, offers one-on-one mentoring, career coaching, as well as a job guarantee within six months of completing a course.
 

The two pillars on which its job guarantee plan works are: Focus on outcome-based courses; and industry exposure via one-on-one mentoring by an expert who typically spends about half an hour per person per week, and sometimes also ends up giving their mentees their first break in their new careers.  

There is no age bar for joining its programmes, but Springboard picks candidates with a better chance of succeeding, and most are in the 24 to 35 bracket. The assurance of a job is a big draw.
 

For Aritra Chattaraj, an arts graduate, who made the transition to being a data scientist, the "job guarantee" was what attracted him first, although he later chose not to take up a full-time job and instead opted to be an independent consultant.

With traditional job criteria like degrees and work history taking a backseat to skills, Springboard trains job-seekers to emphasise those skills with career counselling sessions that are conducted online and are open to all. In future, it wants to deploy AI-driven tools to match job-seekers with open roles or predict their potential employability. Such tools are currently being worked on.
 

“With employers rethinking hiring strategies and skills taking precedence over degrees, our job guarantee promise is more relevant today than ever,” says Springboard’s India Managing Director Vivek Kumar.

He says mentoring equips learners with lifelong job search skills. “It’s the need of the hour.”