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India has one of the largest pools of young talent globally. For a first-time job entrant, choosing a career and getting a job are daunting tasks; even the nature of many jobs is shapeshifting with increasing digitization. Meanwhile, on the company and the recruiter side as well, the ability to assess the right talent at early stages who can join and grow with the company is increasingly difficult as career aspirations keep evolving.

That’s the challenge Stride Ahead is looking to solve. 

A data-driven career management platform for freshers, entry-level talent, early professionals and talent acquisition professionals, the company was founded in 2019 by Piyush Gupta

It enables college entry-level talent, graduates and early professionals to get their first job or internship in line with their interests, personality, skills and aptitude. The platform also seeks to help recruiters to screen and hire freshers in a data-driven manner.

The platform’s unique selling point is its algorithm which works globally for entry-level talent. Stride Ahead is working on creating a credit score for employability which works in English. This score will indicate the overall skills of the candidate based on their cognitive, social, intellectual quotient, and emotional quotient and their area of specialization. 

The benefit for the employer is a pre-screened list of candidates on the basis of their soft and job-specific skills, including data points on how the candidate has performed over time and quantifiable strengths and weaknesses.

The platform has received various awards and recognitions, such as Winner ICICI Trinity 2015, 25 Lakhs award and project from ICICI Bank, Global top 3 by GITEX, Dubai 2014, won various pitch competitions at FMS, IIM A,K etc. and featured by Economics times, Gulf news and many reputed media brands.

Stride Ahead has both a B2B and B2C revenue model. While it provides the API API as a service for companies, and recruiters, for individuals, the platform provides data-driven mentorship as a service to entry-level talent, along with employability-driven training as a service to entry-level talent.

It also gives content recommendations and offers micro-education loans and a talent marketplace for entry-level professionals as a platform as a service (freemium).

The platform is competing with talent assessment platforms such as Test gorilla, Mettl by Mercer, etc., and employability and entry-level upskilling and training platforms such as Scaler.

They are partnering with big talent staffing firms, psychometricians and legal consultants to remain data strong and compliant while creating a brand among HR professionals and students.

As they scale, the role of instincts in hiring, as much as relying on data, would also need to get more customized and sharpened.

We have leveraged AI to generate this entire article and synthesize the images for the same.