Recruitment platform TalentPad raises first round of funding from Helion Advisors

Uptick in hiring market accelerates VC funding in recruitment-related platforms

As the hiring market picks up globally, technology-led recruitment firms in India are increasingly on the radar of venture capital (VC) funds. As a testimony to this trend, online recruitment platform TalentPad today said it has raised an undisclosed amount in its first round of institutional funding from Mauritius-based Helion Advisors.

TalentPad will use these funds to accelerate its marketing initiatives and strengthen its management team. Additionally, Ritesh Banglani, partner at Helion Ventures will join the board of the company.

“There is a huge demand-supply gap in the recruitment segment, especially at the higher end of technology driven businesses, and TalentPad is ideally poised to meet the emerging opportunity,” Banglani said in a statement. “Helion was impressed by the founding team’s intellectual pedigree and a strong combination of business, technology and sales expertise.”

This investment further depicts how Helion Ventures has increased its focus on the hiring sector in India. The VC firm had earlier made investment in Talentauction.com, an auction-based market place for jobs.
 
Other VCs have also stepped up investments in this sector, as Matrix Partners India’s investment in 10-month-old Gurgaon-based GrownOut, which helps companies leverage the professional networks of their employees and automate referral hiring. Also, Nexus Venture Partner has also made investments in two companies-- ZLemma and myNoticePeriod.com, in this sector. IDG Ventures had also made an investment in MyNoticePeriod.com.
 
Founded in 2014 by Mayank Jain, Nikhil Vij and Raghav Jain, alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), TalentPad is an online recruitment platform that connects talent with the best employers in the technology, internet and analytics space. The recruitment platform gets a percentage of the gross salary, as fee, for every candidate hired. The services are free for candidates.

 
Calling itself a ‘curated marketplace’, TalentPad enables recruitment only for companies that are ‘eligible’ for participation. TalentPad also curates candidates, with a focus on tier-I technology talent in the country. The company aims to reverse the traditional job equation and look at the recruitment problem from a candidate perspective.
 
“The ability to curate both supply and demand to ensure perfect matchmaking has led to TalentPad currently working with 150 companies spread across sectors like e-commerce, online media, mobile, enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) and online education,” Helion Ventures said in a release.
 
TalentPad’s clients include several successful Indian startups like InMobi, MakeMyTrip, Snapdeal, Myntra and BookMyShow.