A next gen HR technology solution providers, EdGE Networks offers solutions to large organizations for their most pressing HR challenges: solutions that’s powered by Artificial Intelligence.

“During my first venture, I was often haunted by a question while recruiting talent, “What if my next potential candidate lies within the piles of discarded resumes?” That is when I realized that there was a tremendous need and scope for nextgen HR technology solutions, that could help organizations build future-ready workforces”, says Arjun Pratap, CEO and Founder, EdGE Networks.

“Looking at the rapid pace of change taking place in India and the world, it became clear to me that HR technology powered by Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Machine Learning would be best route to enable workforce transformation”, he further adds.

This is how Arjun Pratap laid the foundation to EdGE Networks in 2012, which is built on the premise of a powerful search & match. They started with building technology platform that could read job descriptions in a resume like a fantastic hiring manager.

How does EdGE Networks stand out from others?

“It is the value that we add to our clients in the HR space, that makes us stand out. Our unique value proposition to clients is that we use Natural Language Processing algorithms with a Data Science and AI based approach to analyse Job Descriptions and profiles/resumes, to provide a scored and stack ranked set of people for the job in question”, says Pratap.

“This is further bolstered with our ability to do this for an internal workforce and to acquire talent from portals. Using advanced technology with minimum human intervention – the disruption we create is the value of time and accuracy and consistently”, he notes.

EdGE Networks : A combination of Data Science, Analytics and AI to transform workforce-

At EdGE, they have a expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Analysis, Data Science, Machine Learning and Predictive Modelling– all of which is geared to enable HR organizations lead with data and intelligence.

Pratap notes “Data Science and AI has been transforming the way we do business today and HR is no exception to this. From fiction in the movie Transformers, to an impressive reality (Watson and Deep Blue), AI algorithms are challenging human intelligence. With their inherent pattern recognition, self-learning and cognitive capabilities, AI powered algorithms have the ability to perform complex jobs with speed and accuracy”.

From talent acquisition and workforce optimization to workforce transformation, Data Science, AI and Analytics are acting as a strategic enabler for HR.  An efficient workforce management approach combines demand generation, skills repository, talent acquisition, allocation, learning and analytics to deliver robust talent connect. “This is what we deliver in EdGE—an end-to-end AI driven solution for workforce optimization – leading to workforce transformation”, says Pratap.

“By leveraging AI, Data Science and Analytics, it has been bringing a sea of change in the speed, accuracy and timeliness of delivery. AI driven applications can act as HR’s weatherman helping them analyze the engagement level of employees, determine flight risk, uncover great talent in the frontline and more”, he adds.

How does it help companies?

EdGE Networks enhances the internal supply visibility through robust skills repository, enabling internal fulfilment and reducing costs incurred in external hiring. They help create intelligent job descriptions with appropriate keywords, lack of which is one of the key reasons for inaccurate resume matches.

This enables instant resume matches, faster job fulfilments and lower hiring cycle time. Due to its inbuilt ability to parse structured and unstructured data, their platform produces more accurate matches, resulting in fewer or nil demand cancellations and allocation failures.

“Our predictive and prescriptive analytics algorithms help optimize resourcing through accurate demand forecasting as well as curb attrition through flight risk scoring. Completing the workforce transformation cycle is the feature of Intelligent Learning Path, that maps the career path of staff, identifies skills gaps and suggests training courses to bridge the gaps”, he notes.

Offerings by EdGE Networks-

HIREalchemy is company’s flagship product, which is a cutting-edge talent acquisition platform powered by AI and Data Science. The platform auto-sources the right fit by parsing and analyzing both structured and unstructured information from internal database as well as external portals. It eases the process of selection as the platform throws up resume matches by scoring and stack ranking them based on business rules set by the client.

“This exponentially enhances the speed and accuracy of job fulfilment and has the potential to save costs in millions of dollars for large businesses”, says Pratap.

Other key distinctive offerings include:

• Workforce Optimization Solution, that forms an intelligence layer on top of HR systems and helping in effective organization building.
• Talent Analytics Suite, that helps in predicting attrition, forecasting resource demand and enabling fact-based decision making across the HR value chain.

Challenges being at the analytics forefront-

Pratap admits that the challenges is two-fold and points out two big challenges: In his words-

• Data quality: Business units within organizations work in silos with disparate HR systems. There is no centralized knowledge management system reducing the depth of analysis that HR could derive as against large data sets allowing multi-dimensional analysis. Data quality is a fundamental problem that many organizations grapple with. However with advanced BI tools, data cleansing and management, organizations are reaching a level where good insights could be gleaned from the data available.

• Skillset: HR analytics is clearly behind marketing or risk analytics disciplines. Organizations quickly jumped on the marketing and risk analytics bandwagon but trailed on HR analytics. But now, there are customers who are keen on adding a layer of intelligence on their existing HR systems to read and analyse data. They are not only focussing on reports and descriptive analytics but also using analytics to make accurate forecasts and take corrective actions based on data-driven recommendations.  

Growth story-

They have had an impressive growth story as they have grown 228% cumulatively in the last 3 years. Last year, the company was awarded the Technology Fast 50 India 2016 awards by Deloitte, and was also one of the two winners to receive the MIDAS & Deloitte Tech Fast50 Award. EDGE was also named in the NASSCOM Emerge 2016 Awards in its list of top 50 emerging startups in India.

EdGE unanimously made it to the Startup 50 Awards 2016 Winners List by The Smart CEO magazine – and top 10 undiscovered startups from India by Equidam. “A case study published by Harvard Business Review is testament to the work we do with our clients”, says Pratap.

“Having built a strong analytics suite in descriptive (Channel mix metrics, Fulfillment metrics, Lead time analysis, Offer drop out ratio) and predictive (Attrition Analysis, Joining Probability, Hiring grid, Location Guidance & Gender ratio) space, we are looking to strengthen our prescriptive analytics suite”, he adds.

Giving an insight on their client list, Pratap notes “Today, our clients are C-suite and HR leaders looking to staff projects with talented people, quickly and without having to rely on inefficient channels of recruitment and allocation. Wipro, HCL, Dell and Microland are some of the large companies that we work with.”

Backed initially by two angels and Pratap himself, in 2013 NSDC funded EdGE Networks with a grant and a debt. Currently they are exploring next round funding which they intend to utilize to build next gen HR tech product and an A-class team.