Vinay Johar of RChilli tells us about empowering the future of the HR tech industry.
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded RChilli.
Vinay Johar: I am the CEO of RChilli. I am passionate about technology and building solutions for the recruitment industry.
RChilli is my third venture, and before this, I ran a consultancy company called e-Connoisseur Infotech Pvt. Ltd. which was into product development outsourcing.
I took part in several fundraisers while managing e-Connoisseur Infotech Pvt. Ltd. That was when I thought we should build our products or services with minimal footprints (i.e., liabilities and resources) and sell them to Fortune 500 companies globally.
While researching about building affordable HR Tech products, we found that resume parser was sold as a luxury product at a whopping price of $10,0000-$150,000 per year.
All I wanted was to enter this resume extraction market and make resume parsing available to small businesses and start-ups.
We saw the opportunity and developed an affordable, reliable, and flexible resume parser. Today with a journey of 10 years, we have 1600+ customers in 44+ countries, and we were the first to start cloud-based pricing. We are happy that we are breaking the monopoly of all big players.
Do you have small habits that made a meaningful impact on your life and business?
Vinay Johar: As an entrepreneur, I have seen many ups and downs. When we fail, we often blame external sources for the failure, but that’s not true. I believe when we fail, we should introspect ourselves and question our conscience “What went wrong and where.” Only then do we realize that we failed because of internal reasons and not external ones.
How does RChilli market its product/services online?
Vinay Johar: Our online marketing strategy is simple yet effective. For us, a customer persona is our topmost priority, and we ensure all our marketing efforts are directed towards it. My team tracks the online footprints of the prospective customers, which means tracking which events they attend, which groups they join, and the types of posts they like, share, and post. This tracking is followed by influencer marketing and public relations, providing us an online edge. We take our content to big platforms such as Forbes, this way, we market our product where the majority stakes are present.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Vinay Johar: Our content marketing team mainly uses HubSpot to manage all our marketing activities and database and also helps us take a deep dive into the analytics part. We use different marketing channels and follow an inbound methodology to attract visitors to our website and other content pieces. Apart from HubSpot, we use various tools and software for each marketing channel, managed by dedicated teams. All the team members have their pre-defined KPIs and KRAs to deliver quality and timely results.
What is your hiring policy/process, and how do you retain your employees?
Vinay Johar: Our hiring policy is simple; we look for employees who have the potential to become assets to the organization. We emphasize skills-based hiring rather than only qualifications as a criterion to hire. One factor that is a constant when we talk about hiring is making sure that the candidate is trainable or not. Every 3-6 months, new skills are added to the same profile globally. Hence, the employee must keep evolving by learning new skills.
We follow our core value system – SUCCESS, emphasizing honesty, innovation, empowerment, and creativity.
Have you heard the quote, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”? We at RChilli, believe that all work and play leads to monotony. Therefore we take regular breaks from routine and plan excursions and hiking activities to keep our employees happy and engaged.
Their (employees) opinion matters, and we involve them in our BIG decisions. I also believe in transparency; it helps the organization grow and set clear expectations.
How are you funding your growth?
Vinay Johar: Primarily, our funding comes from our customers, and with each passing day, we are expanding our customer base with new companies and territories. We have made our product available in 44+ countries and 30+ languages. More importantly, as far as the company’s growth is concerned, we lay more focus on investment. We invest in people, in their training, and aggressively in the research and development of our services.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Vinay Johar: Sovren is our closest competitor since 60-70 percent of our leads have received a competitor quotation from Sovren. Daxtra is also among our competitors. Although we are friends, we do compete in the business world. Each of us has a unique value proposition.
Talking about staying in the game is a vast topic; let me break it down into simple tips. We follow the blue, yellow and red ocean techniques. The Blue ocean technique means we identify the gap areas where our competitors are not present and then enter that gap arena. An appropriate example of this is that we were the first ones to enter the African continent; also, we were the first ones to deliver in the Indian subcontinent. And we are still the market leaders in the Indian subcontinent.
The yellow ocean is where there is not much traffic and not much focus on the competitors. And bang! We enter that space right away. We became the first company to focus on start-ups and introduced start-up plans. Our competitors later started to follow our pathway. Red ocean, we are part of this genre, but we usually avoid being in this space due to lower net margins and low overall profitability. Apart from this, we keep a close track of our competitors, what skills they are adding, and what kind of talent they are hiring; this helps us stay ahead of them.
Tell us a customer success story of yours.
Vinay Johar: Over the years, we have partnered with some of the best names in the industry. You can have a look here: https://www.rchilli.com/customer-speaks.
We have all kinds of companies aboard, including Fortune 500. They all struggle; some want to decrease their recruiter’s workload, while others want to invest in a positive candidate experience.
Business isn’t just about providing goods and services; it is about satisfying and delighting customers. That’s what we live by – delighting our customers!
Your final thoughts?
Vinay Johar: All the hard work is focused on one direction, i.e., to become a unicorn. With the kind of service we offer, advancement, growth, and continuous R&D, we are convinced that RChilli will soon be listed among the top unicorns and a leader among the HR Tech companies.
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