People search platform Youth4work raises $0.5 million from Aurum Equity, GAP

Youth4work, a next generation people search platform that offers ‘pre-assessed’ talent communities for companies to engage and contact, has recently raised $0.5 million bridge capital from a group of investors including angel investors Sanjay Bansal, Dan Sandhu, Aurum Equity Partners LLP and GAP investments.

Founded by Rachit Jain, Youth4Work is a platform where individuals showcase their talent & skills, and are then tested and scored vis-à-vis thousands of others. These pre-assessed profiles are then made available to companies for engaging and communicating about their Brand or hiring more efficiently and quickly.

The platform also helps companies engage people with specific skill sets for specific activities. E.g. – a large IT company engaged with people with interest in designing and get feedback on their products.

Rachit says, “The value proposition is about engaging and interacting with the ‘right’ few people when hiring or engaging for any activity. At Youth4work, we are building data intelligence on People. What sets Youth4work apart from other platforms is the Data Science behind every youth registered with us.”

We assess people by way of online multiple-choice questions that gauge a person’s proficiency in particular skills. A unique yRank is assigned to each talent based on a ranking algorithm considering the person’sperformance in the yTest, contributions in talent discussion forums, profile completeness, social vouches, what they view, show interest on etc.

yRank clearly reflects where a particular person stands viz. a viz. others, thereby making it simpler for companies to decide whom are the few worth engaging with.The platform currently hosts more than 400 talent assessment tests and many more practice tests. Each talent has its own community, which can be reached out for any targeted communications.

“We were impressed with the quality of the platform and felt it had a strong value proposition for companies and youth. The platform is transparent and open for any user to interact and understand the talent rankings.” adds Sanjay Bansal, an angel investor in Youth4Work.

Dan Sandhu says, “The investors were impressed with the execution capability of the team. In less than 2 years into its beta launch, Youth4work has got around 500,000 registered youth who have been tested and profiled and thousands of companies who are actively using it to engage the right talent. The assessment technology built by Youth4work is the USP, The adaptive and Intelligence is unique and highly scalable.” The company currently counts some of the leading names in the industry as its clients including Microsoft, Adobe, Mahindra, Aon Hewitt and thousands of others who engage with the intuitive platform.

The company is actively working on scaling up its products and strengthening its reach of users. They plan to reach and help 2 million users in India alone by 2015.