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Last updated: 09 Mar, 2015  

Lalit Bhagia CEO Myrefers THMB Need to ease regulatory burden for start-ups: Lalit Bhagia

Lalit Bhagia CEO Myrefers
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Saurabh Gupta | 24 Feb, 2015
For young companies to scale up fast, it is important that the government must look into the fiscal incentives other than service and excise tax breaks like that of issuing grants with minimum qualifiers, simplification in filing IT returns, said Lalit Bhagia is Founder & CEO, MyRefers, a Referral based Recruiting Startup.

"Simpler compliances and regulatory processes, paperwork and laws pertaining to manpower, capital gains, bankruptcy and shutting down may help a startup," said Bhagia in an exclusive interview to SME Times. He was associated formerly with Star TV as VP & Head Digital.
Excerpts of the interview...

Please tell our readers more about the concept of MyRefers.com.

Lalit Bhagia: MyRefers (www.myrefers.com) is an external job referral platform that helps companies' crowd-source the best quality candidates using the power of people's social connections. The platform is built like a job marketplace powered by social referrals and enabled by big data intelligence. MyRefers is creating a network of referees, CXOs and recruiters who help connect the best resource pool with high quality jobs, which are then ranked for best fitment through a soon to be patented algorithm before it is shared with our clients.  It is set to benefit the entire ecosystem with help of social scores derived from karma and skills. It is reinforcing a transparent and open platform for the industry to follow.

How this concept works? And also what is Karma Recruiting and Karma Rewards?
Lalit Bhagia: Anyone can refer and register for free on MyRefers. The person who gets referred receives a notification on chat or personal window of the social network selected by the one who referred i.e. choice between Linkedin, Facebook , Twitter or Google plus. Only when the person applies for a post he is referred for is when his application gets moving further for screening purposes.

At MyRefers, friends take up the role of a career guide and refer jobs to each other. They can even apply to a few they like. Companies post open jobs on the platform for free.

The idea to provide its users with the most useful, relevant and updated information, for this, tt is important that MyRefers filters the data and provide its patrons with verified candidate applications and job postings. Rewarding or incentivizing therefore is a tool used to facilitate powerful and direct recommendations. MyRefers delivers extremely relevant applications per opening on the site and that is the core proposition. Clients come to MyRefers as they do not have to sift through large volume unsuitable or irrelevant applications.

MyRefers has a unique concept of Karma Recruiting to encourage and enable referring. Karma Recruiting is harnessing the power of social media networks and applying it to external recruiting. Each application received by a company will be filtered through seven circle TRUST algorithms that filter the candidates and recommend the best ones for every particular job.

The referrer earns what is termed one's Karma Score. They are points awarded to the connector who is making referrals. These connectors also hold a bank of Skills Score in terms of relevant professional connections, associations, education, experience etc. If MyRefers smart algorithms pick the most suitable application, the reference provider is rewarded with Karma money on the premise that good karma should not go unrewarded.

Karma money has two parts - Intro Money i.e. just by sharing a suitable lead one gets rewarded and second is Referral money i.e. a fee paid when a lead gets converted. It is real or actual money paid for each successful referral and no gimmick. There are testimonials from top referrers to provide a proof that rewarding Karma money is a regular thing at MyRefers. Currently, MyRefers has job posting with lead money on them ranging from Rs. 1500 to Rs. 5000 and Referral money is ranging from Rs. 4000 to Rs. 1, 50,000 depending upon a certain job posting by a company.

What motivate you to start this and where you find yourself now?

Lalit Bhagia: I don't have a typical 'garage' story. But I may have a rather righteous one.

As a child, I was always taught about being good, kind and helpful. Not that, Indian parents have a 'Good Child Syndrome', 'Being Good' is very intrinsic to how we Indians usually are brought up. 'Giving' is inherent to our culture, it's our core. While I was growing, I remember whether in school or at home, I was seemingly atypical lad - calmer, more settled and a very happy-go-lucky kid than the rest. So seemingly I didn't' really have to practice being good too much. I didn't know then, this had any bearing to what I may start to do in future.  There wasn't a sudden calling, just a ripple effect of my actions, my karmas. There wasn't a wave that swept me, it happened conscientiously yet naturally.  

Let me not complicate by sounding too philosophical. My concept was germinating since few years in its incubation. It was a gradual process, something that was evolving and a rub off of what I was doing at Star TV already. It was in May, 2012, when I was spearheading the digital strategy and execution of 'Satyamev Jayate', a show we all know, soon after going on air created endearing social effects, it was not limited of being just a 'talk' show, and it had visibly touched the chords -just right. In fact a 'Eureka' idea to let people SMS to donate along with various opportunities for people to participate and be part of the change got it all started.  It was amazing to see the spark it had created on social networks; it was only spreading like fire. I realized people were more than willing to help, it was part of the intrinsic nature, and they only needed a platform. With my team, I was creating and rolling out as many digital platforms for Satyamev Jayate to help broaden the belief of its concept creators - Aamir Khan and my own STAR TV team. It was a butterfly moment for me, not only in terms of transformation but an awakening, a reinstatement of my own self.

Parallel to this, my professional interactions were significantly increasing as per my role and title, consultants would call me for referrals and I was personally also getting more and more involved in the 'right' hiring maze. I was realizing the power of referrals as possibly the best and most effective source of hiring suitable candidates. One day, after office hours, back at home I got into an interesting spiritual talk with my wife, we were pondering upon the course 'Karma kiya jao, phal ki chinta mat karo' (keep doing good karma and do not worry about the fruits) and she had her contentions about how practical the 'Bhagvadgita' learnings are in today's world! How all wives would usually like, I told her she sounds right! Doing 'good' for others is an intrinsic motivation and honestly doing it without an extrinsic motivation arguably 'money' may limit incentivization of sharing the goodness.  This looked like a 'plan'; she was convinced and then pushed me like mad to get things started.  Finally she was the one to take the plunge first; she left her job and started building the alpha product. Soon we had started to check the product and seek assertions with industry experts. So began our series of meetings and discussions to test the idea with HR heads, friends, users,  CFOs, startup entrepreneurs, HR consultants, top referees across industries, industry experts , investment bankers etc. Some amazing inputs from the ecosystem really helped us evolve. Referring is an action word, and here I was seeing my thoughts crystallizing, not remaining ephemeral anymore.

And cliche it may sound but true, I finally left my own cushiony job and fat pay cheque.  Well, media related jobs can hardly be termed as 'cushiony', but I did forgo my plush office cabin and started working from a not so 'garage' looking room in the house.

MyRefers is in an exciting phase, been in business for almost 11 months now and the startup is growing exponentially.  MyRefers is one of the leading and most exciting players in talent crowd sourcing with 35+ clients already on board. The platform uses external referrals to crowd source candidates and have 2900 job openings and over INR 2.5 Crores worth of referral rewards currently on the site. Clients like Gaadi, yepme, 91mobiles, limetray, HCL, M&M, Dentsu, Iprospect c2, WWO, Zapak, Webchutney, Trivone Digital among others are using the product successfully. The company is also voted as among Hottest 50 tech startups in India by Exhibit Magazine in 2014 and is selected by Microsoft for Microsoft Bizspark Plus program and by Google for the Google Startup Launch program.  Earlier this year MyRefers was also selected as among the top 100 tech startups to watch out for in India in 2015.  MyRefers is committed to change the game in the recruitment practices of today, thereby drastically improving the quality of candidate to job matching.

What do you think is the biggest hurdle for anyone who wants to start an entrepreneur with new innovative concept? Especially in the context to a SME (small and medium entrepreneur)
Lalit Bhagia: The biggest hurdle for anyone to start is indecisiveness.

Passion, patience and faith are the key traits an aspiring entrepreneur needs to have. It is important to know that success doesn't come over-night, it takes many nights of burning the midnight oil and many days spent building a life around your dream. You have to eat stress for breakfast and learn to digest it very well. Along with this, you have to train yourself to balance the two worlds that mean the most to you - your family, and the love of your life- your business.
The foremost factor to take care of while initiating a start-up is the finances. Managing the funds judiciously is very important to ensure hassle-free planning and execution. I would suggest you to be stingy and make the most out of your limited funds. Always be ready to evolve with your ideas and warmly welcome any feedbacks or changes. Don't focus only on minting money in the beginning; your primary focus should be product development. At the same time do not take your eye away from generating some cash flows. If you have your product right, have some money going, you will be ready to take on the world, and everything else will always follow. It's important to set the base right before building the business and innovative management techniques are a bonus. Try getting young, enthusiastic people to be a part of your core team as they are always with the freshest of ideas.

In your views what will be the best possible way to tackle that? Also what government can do in this direction?
Lalit Bhagia: I think there are many schemes being run both at the state and national level by the govt, youth today in India also seem inspired to get into managing self employed businesses, it is just about getting the right resources at the right time that should help India and its startups.

Marketing is a must for sustainable growth of any organization. Which type of marketing approach will suit your business best? And how can marketing help you drive business growth?
Lalit Bhagia: The market opportunity is huge; the recruitment industry has long remained unchanged. It's worth a USD 33 billion industry globally and INR 3300 crores industry in India itself. The industry has long suffered from getting bad quality, irrelevant but large volume of profiles. The job boards remain old style classified ones which tend to deliver a lot of profiles, most of which are irrelevant. It's time job boards should change. Not just that even the HR consultants are not doing justice to the recruitment process with most of them not going beyond resume scanning which are downloaded from various job sites. We believe we can change all that, and more, and hence we believe we have the entire market as the opportunity. Hence, the default strategy is that of pervasive in nature.

From this perspective, our target users are not limited by any national or international boundaries. We realized people all over the world are motivated by a lot of factors to undertake various activities in life. There are intrinsic motivators, like the pleasure of helping people, the bonding and trust that surfaces in relationships due to good referrals, and feeling a sense of belongingness while we become a part of people's lives. Then there are extrinsic motivators, like wanting to get respect and recognition in one's social circles by making good referrals, and projecting a desired self-image. Also, the referral money is a bonus!

We have taken into consideration all these aspects in designing the marketing strategy for MyRefers. People might come across a job that doesn't interest them, but can be of help to a friend. So, the above factors might motivate them to refer that job to a peer. We have integrated their social networks on MyRefers to make the process of referring easy and accessible.

How you see online marketing tools? Which types of tools are you already using to monitor your own performance?
Lalit Bhagia: Currently we are focusing on building good content, and expanding our reach across the social media as much as possible. We are approaching various categories of users like people who work from home, stay-at-home moms, retired professionals, etc, who can simply refer and earn from the comfort of their homes. We are active on social networks like:
www.myrefers.com
https://www.facebook.com/Myrefers
https://www.linkedin.com/company/3245947?trk=tyah&trkInfo=tarId%3A1421040539693%2Ctas%3Amyrefers%2Cidx%3A2-1-3

What are your future plans for expansion?
Lalit Bhagia: As mentioned before, Myrefers is a global product, you will soon see us launching in international markets. We are currently evaluating a new developing Asian market and a large developed economy.
 
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