New Delhi, Sep 1 (IANS): As India charts a new digital journey across industries, companies are looking for the best talent to scale. In such a scenario, the role of online hiring and engagement platforms become paramount, which can enable companies to engage with candidates in the most interactive way to discover, assess and hire the best talent.

EduHRTech Startup Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete) with more than three million active users is simplifying the entire HR lifecycle for companies and for students, simplifying their career journey.

Ankit Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, Unstop, told IANS that unlike other edtech platforms, they don't intend to get into curating and selling courses but provide students opportunities to showcase their skills, get recognised, build their CVs and get hired.

Here are the experts from his interview:

Q: What is the long-term vision and mission statement of Unstop?

A: Unstop is a community engagement and hiring platform derived from our belief -- #BeUnstoppable.

Unstop enables companies to discover, engage, assess, and hire the right talent #BeyondBoundaries through gamified engagements -- hackathons, coding challenges, business case competitions, simulation games, quizzes, hiring challenges, etc. This is in addition to the traditional method of custom job listings to take applications, do tech and non-tech skill-based MCQ and coding assessments, and take interviews.

Unstop also connects unstoppable talent with the world of opportunities to let them #GoBeyondResume. It enables students and early professionals across domains, irrespective of their background, to learn, practice, and participate in gamified engagements like hackathons, quizzes, case competitions, simulations, etc., organised by companies and institutes for their recruitment, employer branding, and general engagement needs.

In this process, they get rewarded, recognized, gain resume points, and eventually get hired by their dream companies.

In true sense, Unstop is democratizing engagements and hiring by connecting the world's talent.

Q: What is your USP? How do you distinguish yourself in the EdTech landscape?

A: To Look at us as enablers of pure-play EdTech platforms. We don't intend to get into curating and selling courses. We provide students opportunities to showcase their skills, get recognized, build their CVs, and get hired.

All these EdTech platforms will thrive if their students get placed in their dream companies or excel in their domain by outsmarting others in that segment. And we, at Unstop, do precisely that. Give them those opportunities. This is our USP and differentiates us from other players.

Our MOAT is our organically growing community of 3.5 Mn students & early talent across domains. And these users become our customers in a true product-led-growth fashion.

We provide our platform free to students to host their engagements on Unstop so that they can promote it in their network. This gets us new user acquisitions and existing user engagements. And companies want to engage and hire from this community to #GoBeyondBoundaries and #GoBeyondResumes.

It's similar to users creating pages on FB and LinkedIn organically and then promoting them to get more followers and subscribers. Eventually, this network effect makes FB and LinkedIn stronger with each new page. Similarly, Unstop strengthens its position with each new organic listing.

Q: Tell us about the scale of your operations and expansion plans over the next couple of years.

A: Being bootstrapped, we've grown humbly 2x over the last couple of years. We intend now to do 3x to 5x growth in the next couple of years across parameters like Revenue, Clients, User Base, User Engagements, Opportunity Listings, etc.

Today, we are a 3.5 million strong student community across domains -- MBAs, Engineering, Arts, Science, Commerce, etc., from 40,000 colleges and companies. We get 3,000 organic listings on Unstop each month which is 2x of what we did last year.

We have more than 200 companies and colleges as paying customers, and this year more than 60 per cent of business is coming from new clients, and we're expecting 90 per cent + repeat business from the existing clients. This is phenomenal growth. Especially when your marketing spends are negligible.

We continue to invest 60 per cent of our profits in existing use cases and markets with 40 per cent in newer ones. This ensures that we penetrate our existing market while trying newer growth areas.

We're launching our B2C SaaS so that any company, regardless of size and budget, starts using us. We are following the AWS way of working, Pay-as-you-go and charge discrete products and services to enable growth across the spectrum of your customer personas.

Q: Give us a few examples (customer success stories) on the impact you have had on students and Businesses.

A: Walmart Global Tech India launched two engagements to hire female coders. Through diversity focussed hackathons (hiring challenge), Walmart engaged with 90,000+ girl coders across the country and eventually hired 300+.

Similarly, Amazon engaged with 22,000+ MBA students through 1 single engagement, and Flipkart engaged with 1.6 lakh engineering students.

And Unstop enables students and early professionals across domains, irrespective of their background, to learn, practice, and participate in gamified engagements like hackathons, quizzes, case competitions, simulations, etc. organised by companies to showcase their skills, get recognized, gain resume points, and eventually get hired.

More than 3.5 million students and professionals use our platform.

Q: What are some of the emerging technologies that will further reshape education over the next 4-5 years?

A: From our industry standpoint, anything that puts students into a job-ready position will get a push. And companies like ours that provide opportunities to anyone and everyone #BeyondBoundaries and #BeyondResumes will grow multifold as companies are also scaling with positions getting filled by the best talent irrespective of their college, city, and academic background. Only their skills matter, and that is how it should be.

Q: What has cloud technology and AWS allowed you to do that you couldn't do before?

A: AWS has allowed us to scale instantly within a secure environment to protect our data. As a SaaS enterprise, spikes can come in at any point in time from anywhere across the globe. AWS has ensured that we are ready for that spike.

Enabling newer use cases at a breeze, AWS's ever-evolving ecosystem with new APIs and services helps us think through newer use cases we can use for our users. Example: We have one of the best next-gen proctoring mechanisms based on the Amazon Rekognition engine. We are working on a Netflix-like recommendation engine based on the Amazon Personalize engine.

We've provided a one-stop solution to our clients because of the one-stop solution to us from AWS. We've done 1.6 lakh assessments for one of our clients over 24 hours seamlessly due to serverless architecture and instant scaling.

We've increased our capacity by 20x by signing up for serverless databases instantly. We've reduced our latency by half and our availability across the globe by using a multi-region availability cloud network. We've launched newer use cases and features for our users in one-third of the time because of AWS APIs like Amazon Rekognition.