Interview with Kadhiravan Jayachandiran, Founder of KultureHire

- Good afternoon, Kadhiravan.

- Nice to see you!

- I had a chance to check your LinkedIn profile, YouTube channel, and websites. I was amazed at the amount of experience you have in various fields. You have deep insights in recruiting, business operations, and in Microsoft Excel. It was quite puzzling to me. I’d like to express my deepest respect for your versatility.?

- Thank you very much.

- I wonder when did you start learning Excel and what are the benefits that you can reap now for that??

- Thank you for your question. I started learning Excel because of the job needs during my 2nd year of a professional career, it’s 13 years now. I was managing a team and had to do a lot of analytics. Excel was absolutely indispensable tool, and much of credit goes to Excel because it gives a lot of exposure.

- Does it still work well or you’ve found some other instruments?

- No, Excel still holds the fort. It allows me to run my operations very lean, despite the fact that our company has 1500 – 2000 learners at this moment. I have only one employee responsible for running operations, because the rest goes automatically with Excel and Google Sheets.

- Sounds cool. I know that you have a huge pool of potential employees that you can hire among your followers and subscribers at other platforms, and among your students. Do you use this source of talents??

- Of course, I do. I look at a person’s potential for risk taking and whether or not they fit the work ethics and culture of startups, rather than big enterprises. I still have my first 50 employees hired from my previous student base.

- I’ve seen that apart from LinkedIn you also use YouTube to extend your social presence. What are other platforms that you use, and how much time and effort do you spend on increasing social media exposure? Does it really help, for instance, to find employees, and to what extent it contributes to the development of your startup??

- LinkedIn is a very powerful instrument to build trust. I joined it back in 2015 and posted there quite enthusiastically. It helped me a lot at the early stage of my career building. And it’s absolutely essential to get this credit for every entrepreneur from the very beginning. I’m not sure if other platforms give that much trust compared to LinkedIn. As of today, a lot of traffic comes from LinkedIn to our platform, although I was not active in posting things in recent years.?

Concerning YouTube, I would say it’s just an additional instrument for us. It is also a powerful tool, but it takes an insane amount of time to build trust, because you have to upload at least a dozen videos, and each video must be post-edited to achieve modern quality standards. All that takes a lot of time. It’s way easier to write simple posts on LinkedIn and get higher results. That’s why YouTube is just an occasional effort that we take. We put outdated content there, while the current content goes to Skillshare, Udemy and other platforms.

- Speaking about startups, I wonder how you came up with an idea to launch your own company. What were the issues in the current job market in India that made you start doing what you do?

- I started in 2015 and my first startup was called Search2Hired. It was a job search platform. We were willing to compete with other companies like ours, but we eventually failed. Within a year of operations, we shut that down. But it was not as bad as it seems. We realized a lot of things that we had done wrong. The second startup went way better.

I was always passionate about recruitment and helping others. That’s where my core of a founder comes in. If you see someone struggling and you can help them, then you have to help them. But I couldn’t figure out how I could help people and what deep problem of society I could solve, until the pandemic happened.?

When the lockdown was over, my wife and I went to a combined showroom, one for watches and another for footwear, to buy my wife some slippers and watches. And there was a girl, an engineering graduate, who managed both stores all by herself. Having talked to her, we found out that she had graduated earlier that year and came to our township from a nearby village. She wanted to find a job and found this combined showroom where she worked 7 days a week without weekends or holidays.

She had to clean it, manage it, do billing and a whole host of other duties all by herself. And her income was extremely low – about 40$ a month. The same is with everyone who comes from villages in India. There was no chance for her to find a more decent job, because she didn’t have skills and she didn’t know where to apply, and she didn’t have a mindset to go and do that. She had to waste a lot of time and effort doing the wrong things.?

Then it was that an idea came to my mind. I decided to make my next startup all about teaching people marketable skills and then provide them with an opportunity to apply that skillset. And the problem was that this practical learning ability, when you can instantly apply your skills to a real job, is missing everywhere. In colleges and beaten educational institutes there is no option to apply your skills in practice whatsoever. And it’s very hard when you are young and have a lot of energy and willing to change the world for the good, but you don’t know how you can do that. Another problem is that when you are a novice at a job, you’ll not be trusted with serious tasks, and thus you don’t have an opportunity to grow.?

No employer would allow their employees to make mistakes. But how can you achieve prowess when you are not allowed to make mistakes? It’s impossible. It became crystal clear to me that it was the issue that I should probably solve. From then on, everything started.?

- Your startup is called KultureHire, and you put a special emphasis on finding candidates that are culturally fit for the company. Could you please specify why it is so important and is it really worth it?

- We realized that there were underlying issues preventing people, particularly fresh college graduates, from finding jobs. Many of these issues were related to a lack of skills, knowledge about where to apply, and a mindset that left them ill-prepared for work. That’s why we aim to promote exposure to different job functions and provide learners with a practical understanding of various roles. Through this approach, we hope to help people identify their passions much earlier in their careers, potentially saving years of trial-and-error.?

By focusing on a candidate's cultural fit with a company rather than just their technical capabilities, KultureHire offers a unique approach to hiring that places a higher emphasis on core values. We also recognize that freshers, new graduates, may take some time to adapt to a new work culture, as well as build trust with their employers, especially in high stakes positions.

We strive to provide a safe place for learners to make mistakes and learn from them, as part of their journey towards becoming more competent professionals in their chosen field.

- By culture you mean the standards of the organization as well as some kind of mindset of employees. Are these two terms interconnected?

- Of course, they are. Both these cultures must coincide in order to get the highest result. Let me elaborate on this moment. Culture of a day 1 organization is a lot different from a day 100 organization. And that organizational culture is a lot different from a day 1000 organization. And it's going to evolve further.?

And we want our learners to understand this tendency, to look at an employer not just as an employer, but an evolving employer, because every organization evolves. And the fundamental reason why employees don't stick with one organization is that they're not evolving along with the organization. We want to bring that mindset.?

- In your opinion, to what extent is passion important?

- If you haven't figured out what to do with life, then it becomes hard because you have to do different things to understand your passion. But the fundamental reason why passion is important is that it gives you grit. It gives you the ability to think forward, even in the worst of situations. If you have passion for a job, then you will fight for it. You will not give up on whatever happens. Every time you see a challenge, you have strength to solve it. So that's where passion kicks in. The skills run second. Once you have a passion, it becomes your life, and you will always outperform other candidates

As for me, I’m absolutely passionate about my job. I don’t track my work, never think of how much time is left till the end of my working process, never think when to begin. I’m always there ready to do tasks, because it’s my life. The same is with my employees, it’s our company culture.?

- If you could put a certain mindset in every graduate and candidate, what would that be?

- In today's internet age, job seekers should consider exploring different career paths beyond the preconceived notion of seeing work as mere branding. A fancy infrastructure or branding is not all the job entails. While ambition is important, it is equally vital to have a clear understanding of the actual job roles and execution requirements. Applying for a job without any effort towards understanding the job or the team culture is an indication that it may not be the right fit. I want to put the following idea into the minds of candidates: ask multiple relevant questions about a job. If you don’t have this natural willingness of asking questions about this or that job, then this job is probably not for you.?

Go and try as many jobs as you can. You don’t have to spend weeks on each of them. Several hours will be enough. Just make short research of a job, understand their branding, culture and working ethics before you get there. Go and try to do something for a new employer for free before even enrolling into their team. It will give you the understanding of whether you feel passion for it or not.

- And what advice would you give to employers? How to find the right fit for a company?

- It differs from employer to employer, but I’m sure it’s better to hire a person after working with them, not just talking with them. There's a great difference and looking at the resume, having to discuss and then doing a few initial rounds of interviews is not going to reveal a lot about a person. But when you work with them, that's when the true personality comes out. And that's something that every employer can do. People talk the talk, but you’ve got to know whether they walk the walk. If you want fast results and you don’t want to spend time on actually working with people, then it might be a hiring mistake. And that's very expensive. Whereas when you work with someone for a couple of days, you’ll see how they behave in different challenges.

- You mean that employers should create a certain framework for people so that they can enroll and make mistakes, show how they apply their skills of work and demonstrate their skills, demonstrate their work ethic, stuff like this, right??

- Absolutely. Employers should create an environment where people are allowed to make mistakes, or at least explore different facets within an organization.?

- In your opinion, what are the technical and soft skills that will be in high demand in the future??

- Creativity will be a crucial skill in the workforce. Specialists and generalists in specific job functions will be in demand, as new technology such as ChatGPT reduces inefficiencies in organizations. This will eliminate positions focused solely on eradicating inefficiencies, leaving room for those capable of end-to-end work in their specific function. The need for engineers will decrease as AI takes over their time-consuming sub-process work.?

Employers will shift their mindset to focus on growth beyond just fixing shortcomings, resulting in new job opportunities. Hyper-local entrepreneurship is already emerging, with entrepreneurs solving problems within their communities. In short, creativity and specialization / generalization within specific job functions will be essential. Organizations will focus on growth beyond mere efficiency. Entrepreneurs solving problems within their communities will become increasingly prevalent.

- Will AI become dangerous to people in a sense that it will replace us in doing our work?

- I don't think AI is essentially here to take away everyone's job. It won’t happen. AI just complements people’s capacities. If I have to find a solution to a particular problem, AI is going to help me there. I could tell that, hey, these are the solutions I tried, they are not working out, I want something better. Then someone else in this world has done it. And AI simply does the job of reaching this unknown person, getting that solution and then giving it to me. It's not doing anything else. And it's not going to do the job for you. It's not going to give the solution all by itself. And I think AI will have its limitations as well, because humans are very smart.

The moment we get exposed to something challenging, we have always had the ability to overcome it. Be it a computer revolution or an industrial revolution, we managed and outsmarted it. The same will be with this new challenge of AI. Overcoming challenges makes us stronger; it stimulates us to transgress our limits.

- How different the world can become because of what you are doing? What is your biggest mission and broadest vision for what to do next??

- Our primary goal is to solve the employability problem in India by focusing on developing practical learning journeys for data analytics professions, specifically business analytics. With a current focus on 1500 learners and growing 100% month on month, our aim is to capture the entire market with around 50,000-55,000 learners within a year.

Once this is achieved, we plan on diversifying into other job markets like marketing and product management. We are also experimenting with full-stack marketers that can handle all aspects of a company's marketing. While there is traction outside of India, we remain cautious and focused on our goal of solving India's employability problem. In our vision this is going to happen within the next 5 to 10 years.

- At what stage of development are you now? Do you have any metrics of your startup?

- The primary metric of KultureHire is intent. This is a human metric that we have. But when it comes to business metrics, our primary metric is in terms of how many people get jobs. At this moment people who get job after completing our program within a 90-day period is around 20%.

We’re trying to improve this figure or lessen the timeline to 30 days and then to a week. These are our goals. And the number of improvements to completion is around 17% now. Although we are not satisfied with our current statistics, still we are actually doing far better than any other company on this market.

- That's great. I’m sure you will succeed in what you’re doing. I see that you can easily become a large company, which will provide students and graduates with a whole set of knowledge and skills for the professions of the future. I wish you success.

- Thank you.