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Attracting and retaining talent is one of the biggest issues faced by companies today. Most employees are leaving companies due to negative or toxic environment or due to culture misfit. Hence, successful organisations are recognising the value of their workforce and are constantly looking for strategies that will help them hold onto top performers.

Innvocon Learning Solutions, founded by Taranjeet Singh (CEO), Pragyanam Kumar (COO), and Nancy Bagla (CTO) in 2019, is focussed on solving problems for companies like high attrition rates, increasing cost per hire, or problems such as lack of new-age industry relevant skills. 

The Dehradun-based startup helps new candidates in a company adapt to new processes, know about the vision, expectations, opportunities, and the purpose of the company. 

Taranjeet says, “With these traits and parameters made clear before being employed by a company, the employee will be familiar about the structure and vision of the company, and hence both the employer and employee will have clear expectations from each other. This leads to better growth opportunities within the organisation for the employee, increased productivity, and lowers down the urge for employees to look out for other job opportunities to a great extent.”

The startup also offers training alongside technical and soft skills requirements of the company.

How it started?

The co-founders got the idea to start up when they were in their third year of engineering. They personally experienced the problem of lack of practical and industry exposure while studying.

Taranjeet states, “Upon analysing the problem, its scale, and after doing the market research surveys with multiple companies, colleges, and hundreds of engineering students, we concluded that companies are suffering big time from the unavailability of skilled talent. Not only this, the attrition rates among Indian firms hiring for tech and IT is too high. The reason for this is not just low proficiency of the candidates, but culture misfit of the candidates in the company, which is largely ignored during the training and hiring process.”

After realising the actual scale of problems faced by companies, colleges, and students, the startup came up with a ‘Smart Hiring’ solution for companies. 

For colleges, the startup came up with ‘Center for Project Based Learning’, and for students, it launched a ‘Workplace Learning Program’, which are interlinked to each other.

An IIITD-IC and NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore incubated company, Innvocon partners with organisations to build reliable and pre-skilled teams with top talent curated, tailored, and trained specifically as per the hiring objectives of the companies. 

“We curate the candidates on the basis of the workplace culture of the company so that the company finds the culturally fit candidate employable right from Day 1,” adds Taranjeet. 

The startup also partners with academic institutions to help them achieve better placement figures and high mean and median packages for the freshers from these institutions.

“We are helping colleges by increasing their placement figures as well as increase in median and mean packages. We are establishing a ‘Center for Project Based Learning’, thus helping the institutes impart project-based learning by creating an industry-oriented learning ecosystem right from the first year of college, thus creating a learning path for students for the entire four-year degree programme,” adds Taranjeet.

“We take the requirements from the companies and on the basis of these, the entire course is customised. So, we train candidates on the basis of these requirements,” states Taranjeet.

The team

The co-founders have known each other for nine years. Taranjeet and Pragyanam were school friends, and Taranjeet and Nancy were batchmates and friends in college. Working towards a common goal of solving large scale problems made them start their entrepreneurial journey together. 

The startup has a pool of over 200 highly skilled mentors, proficient in Data Science, AI and Machine Learning, and Full Stack Web Development.

These mentors are professionals currently employed in reputed companies like Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Unacademy, MPL, etc., and are working at Innvocon as freelance trainers for different skills in which they have high level industry proficiency. 

Taranjeet says, each mentor is onboarded after following a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and each mentor should have at least five years of industry experience in the aforementioned domains. 

Currently, the startup has a 12-member team, including the co-founders. 

Course structure and target audience

The entire content structure is customised according to the hiring needs of the company. The domains in which they train the candidates and hire for companies includes Data Science (for computer science/IT graduates); AI and Machine Learning (for computer science/IT graduates); Full Stack Web Development (for computer science/IT graduates); and Data Analytics (any graduate).

The fee structure for the job inclusive programme for students is Rs 15,000, which is offered to the final year students, and for first, second, and third year students, introductory to advanced level programmes are offered, wherein the pricing ranges from Rs 5,999 to Rs 9,999. The duration of the programme ranges from three to six months.

The candidates are trained through live classes on their web application platform and they can also refer to the recordings of live lectures, interact with the mentors live, and attend the interviews. The colleges can take their entire training and placement cell online, track the companies recruiting their students, number of students hired, and those in pipeline to be hired.

The business and competition

According to various market experts, the Indian IT Industry is battling an all-time high attrition rate of around 25 percent. For the quarter ending December 2021, IT major TCS saw an attrition rate of 15.30 percent, while Infosys and Wipro’s numbers stood at 25.50 percent and 22.70 percent, respectively. 

According to Taranjeet, the startup competes with players like AccoJobs and FunctionUp. However, the startup’s USP lies in its custom-made Project Based Learning designed according to the hiring needs of the company. 

“Our training programme is designed to provide maximum hands-on experience. Industry experts who train the candidates on the tech stack and projects make them interview ready and HR leaders help them get familiar with the structure, processes, and vision of the company,” highlights Taranjeet.

The startup has around 30 partner colleges, over 50 companies as partners, and has placed over 250 students in both tech and non-tech profiles.

The company makes revenue by charging 5 percent of the annual CTC of the candidate who gets hired by a company through Innvocon. It claims to have generated a revenue of Rs 50.3 lakh in FY22 with a run rate of Rs 1.3 crore.

The co-founders started the company with their personnel investment of Rs 1 lakh, and they have infused Rs 8 lakh of their funds till now. Innvocon has also raised Rs 10 lakh from IIIT Delhi Innovation and Incubation Center and has also raised an undisclosed amount from HNIs.

“We plan to raise our seed round in the next 10-12 months with at least an infusion of Rs 2 crore in the company through external investors,” adds Taranjeet.

Plans ahead

In the coming months, the startup plans to scale its college network to Delhi-NCR and Haryana.

“The target is to onboard at least 250 colleges and universities from this geography and onboard another 100 companies. We also have a milestone target of placing 700 students in the next 12 months, and train over 10,000 students in the next 12-18 months,” states Taranjeet.

Innvocon has also started cross border hiring for companies based in the USA and Canada. The candidates will be curated on the basis of the hiring needs of the company, and will be based out of India, working remotely for these companies in the USA and Canada.