• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

R. Savitha

Wouldn't the HR department love to be hit by a brainwave when it comes to recruiting talent?

SELECTING the right candidate for a job is a real challenge for any company's HR Department. This is especially true during slowdown times when more people are desperate to land any job, not just what suits them or is suitable for them.

The Pune-based Brainswave Technologies Pvt Ltd hopes to target this need effectively. It is hitting the market with an e-recruitment assistant, A1brains.com.

Is it just another software that claims it can tackle HR problems? Not quite, says the company. ``A1brains.com will help an organisation in testing the skills of potential candidates and evaluating their suitability without wasting time reading unwanted and mismatched curriculum vitae (CV),'' says Surendrasingh J. Bhalla, Chief Executive Officer, Brainswave.

According to him, the software incorporates all the essential steps of the recruitment process, including -level filtration of the CV, online testing and evaluation of skills, providing test results and statistical information. Bhalla says it provides for capturing the CV in predefined format with validations and automatic forwarding of the CV matching the parameters set by the company. It ensures that the CV of short-listed candidates is brought to the desk in the same format along with the performance results of skill tests.

A1brains.com downloads the required data onto the local machine and stores it in a database for further analysis. A browser-based utility is provided to access the local database and assist the HR personnel. What about pricing, especially in a scenario where companies are cutting costs to reduce overheads? "Since it is an ASP model, the company intends to charge Rs 100 per candidate,'' he says. The tests would be conducted in a secure environment and the company has tied up with Dishnet, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) for access. Candidates would be notified before the interview "but they will have to identify themselves to prevent foul play." The pricing structure is variable. The price would decrease with the number of CV a company would have to sort. The more the CV, the less the companies pay.

"It could be as low as Rs 15 per CV,'' he says. If an organisation wanted to install the software at their end, the total package cost would come to Rs 17 lakh.

Are there any comparable products in the domestic market? Activrecruiter, which has hit the market recently and BlueShift, developed by a Chennai-based company. "Compared to these, ours is a flexible solution where the portal captures the CV of candidates with validation of relevant fields. It compares the details with the parameters set by the company,'' he says.

The portal allows only those candidates whose CV matches the qualifying parameters set by the company to appear for the skill test which covers two areas — technical (Java, XML, VB, Oracle) and non-technical (aptitude, English, mathematical, analytical reasoning. logical reasoning and psychometric).

"Companies can predefine the duration of the tests and the number of questions for each test. The technical tests would have different skill levels in increasing order of complexity,'' he says.

A1brains.com can also be used to conduct online examinations. It would help test the skills of the candidates without waste of time and resources.In this version, it has a parameter-driven design that reduces the application implementation time.

When the requirements for a particular course change, new selection criteria can be specified and the changes become effective immediately, he says. Both these are also now available in the client server environment.

Brainswave is also coming out with another product, the Ikar — for income-tax calculation. This is a system to compute the assessee's total income. "Ikar is capable of handling a single organisation as well as a group of companies under one umbrella depending on the user's requirement,'' says Bhalla.

The benefits include one-click reference to income-tax rules. The final form to be submitted to the department can be downloaded. The user does not have to test his/her memory for recalling ceiling amounts and various exemptions and deductions under the Act. The pricing is yet to be worked out, he says.

rsavitha@hotmail.com

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section
I wanna surf, freebie or no

Copyright © 2002, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line