A start-up is helping B-schools manage their placement process

Inducted into the placement committee in the first year of their MBA (Master of Business Administration) at the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi, batchmates Vidyarthi Baddireddy and Kajal Malik found the campus recruitment process quite “manual” and “tedious”.  

During the peak placement season they were on their feet for hours, manually crossing out students and recruiters who were done with interviews on A4 sheets or whiteboards. Collating final data from the sheets or boards was even more cumbersome.

So in their second year at FMS, Baddireddy and Malik, along with their team, put their engineering and technology skills to work to come up with a Microsoft Excel Solver solution that would digitise the manual labour.

And that is how Reculta was founded by the two FMS batchmates within two years of their graduation. Founded in January 2017, the start-up helps B-schools manage their placement process more effectively.

Simply put, Reculta digitises and organises campus recruitment by providing digital placement solutions for both schools and recruiters. It provides a SaaS (software as a service)-based platform that helps institutes feed in and analyse batch details for placements while recruiters screen candidates before travelling to campus. Students create standardised resumes, keep tabs on participating companies and select interviews in advance.

Based on a per student per annum subscription model, Reculta is still in the price discovery mode. 

“We are trying to create a marketplace for schools, students and companies where they can exchange data relevant for recruitment. While recruiters can key in criteria and select students, the students can apply digitally,” says Baddireddy, who roped in a former Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) placement committee member, Utsav Bhattacharjee, as the third co-founder.

The platform offers tools and dashboards featuring data analytics, data intelligence and process automation to its users.

Reculta claims that placement teams, students and recruiters alike will be able to save up to 40 per cent of their time otherwise spent on non-value-adding activities.

“Institutes acquire visibility and receive regular feedback from industry to refine their pedagogy and make students market ready. Recruiters can save costs, reduce the recruitment cycle, go for analytics-driven hiring and gain a wider reach of institutions,” says Malik.

For instance, a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company looking for a candidate with a marketing background for Tamil Nadu will typically receive over 200 resumes from institutes, which will be filtered by the HR department to 50. This will then be passed on to the business head who will travel to campus for interviews. This process takes between a fortnight and two months. 

“With Reculta, the firm can digitally fix the criteria that will enable only appropriate candidates to apply for interviews,” Malik explains.

The eight-member strong start-up has bagged contracts from the likes of IIM-A, IIM Raipur, IIM Nagpur, FMS Delhi, IIFT Delhi and Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar (XIMB), even as it is in talks with more institutes and companies. 

As co-founder and chief sales officer (CSO), Malik is bullish on bagging 30-40 institutes and at least 10 recruiters by the end of the financial year, when final placements at most campuses will be over. “In three years, we are targeting 500 institutes, including engineering and other streams, and 300 recruiters,” says Malik.

Almost entirely bootstrapped, Reculta co-founder Bhattacharjee was recently selected by IIM-A’s incubator CIIE as one of the awardees for the first edition of its Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) programme. This recognition comes along with a stipend of Rs 30,000 per month, mentorship and incubation support of CIIE.