Team Members:
Ashish Vikram Singh Nikita Dua Rajshree Vijay Mrinal Madhukulya Shayantan Ghosh Pritesh Nisar
INTRODUCTION
India is the fastest growing economy in the world & the growth has been dynamism for service sector & growing at double digit rate. The strongest growth in 1990’s was in business services particularly IT & ITES. With advance in technology, technology, it has become possible to deliver services over long distance at reasonable cost. With a favorable demographic profile, English being widely accepted medium of communication, low cost offshore work translating into average saving 25-40% of cost. India has the largest talent pool in the world which is 1.5 times that of China & twice that of US.
India ranks 1 in the availability of scientists & engineers, 5 in the quality of math & science education, quality of business management schools is rated at 6. India has 272 universities, 58 deemed universities, 1600 colleges & more than 1000 Engineering Engineeri ng & Management institutions with total enrollment totaling to 9.3 million. India churning out 2.3 million graduates & 3 lac postgraduates every year & boasts of of close to 4 lac engineers, more than 1 lac management graduates, 25,000 medical doctors & 12,000 PhDs.
MERIT-TRAC: Emergence of a Strong Idea
Merit-Trac was conceived by Madan Padak, an IT professional with stints at Wipro, Infosys & BFL Software. Idea that led to launch of Merit- Trac Trac was conceived when Madan was catching up with two of his friends- Krishna & Suresh- who were running a software venture called First Shot which was into financial risk management management software products. First Shot had been asked by its leading client to develop software product to manage its question bank for prerecruitment testing Madan realized that building a service around this could add value to clients & represented a potential business opportunity.
In the booming IT industry in 2000, “Aptitude Tests” Tests” were commonly used by IT & other engineering firms to filter candidates for interview. interview.
Idea was to provide testing & assessment services to corporate to help them in recruiting big numbers, nu mbers, which was the emerging need. After discussion they identify key activities- such as test design, paper printing, test administration & post test feedback Merit-Trac was launched in August 2000.
Beginning of Journe Journey y
First Shot’s technical & administrative resources to get the basics of Merit-Trac’s product & services up & running.
The core content management system developed by Suresh & Krishna was modified using technical resources available from First Shot. For activities involved in delivering Merit- Trac’s services, such as printing test sheet, locating test centers, finding test supervisors, supervisors, collecting & grading grading test papers, etc., they relied on administrative support from First Shot. First customer was none other than th an Wipro, Wipro, Pratik Kumar, Executive VP(HR) at Wipro Wipro was one of the first people to give his vote of confidence when Madan approached him with the concept in 2000.
Finding an Angel Inv Investor estor
In next few months Merit-Trac had come a long way. way. By November 2000,the business had:
For
customers- two of which were blue-chip companies
A
founding team with a complementary set of skills and experience.
A
modest office space
Revenue
of $10,000
MANTRAS OF SUCCESS
Volume Game Typically, ypically, Merit-Trac assesses around 75,000 candidates every month. From April 2006-March 2007, Merit-Trac tested around 7000,000 candidates and they have assessed over 1.5 million candidates till date. IT industry has absorbed around 50-60 thousand fresh recruits and BPO 125,000 in the year 2004 whereas year 2005 created 75,000 new jobs in IT & 150,000 in BPO sectors. BPO sector alone is expected to need manpower of 1.1 million by 2008.
Given that the applicant- offer ratio is around 8-10% one can imagine the number of applicants required to be processed by by IT & BPO industry. This speaks volumes in terms of opportunity opportun ity for Merit-Trac, which still happens to be the only major player in the recruitment process outsourcing space. Merit-Trac takes care of ICICI One Source’s recruitment back office and also part of the selection process. It has screened over 300,000 candidates in 2006 for the BPO sector – averaging averaging 20,000-30,000 candidates every month.
Assessment Process
Merit-Trac’s job starts from the moment client forwards these resumes for initial screening. Resumes are screened on the basis of parameters defined by the client, short listed candidates are then scheduled for assessments & those who manage to clear it are scheduled for interviews. Assessments are broadly classified into 4 broad areas. Merit-Trac’s content bank has over 60,000 questions that are constantly updated. 150 experts on various subjects from across the globe chip in to help Merit-Trac develop its test .
Model based on license cost per candidate assessed and a variable cost per transaction. Numerically, Numerically, this can be as low as Rs Rs 150 ($3-4) per BPO candidate & Rs 600-700 ($13-15) per IT candidate & vary depending multiplicity, multiplicity, customizing & difficulty of test. Focus and Neutrality Merit-Trac has managed to clock growth rate of 300% in the initial few years It is an Assessment-Only company & nothing to do with training & staffing. Very clear in their thei r minds that the company will work in his domain only & built credibility by focus.
SERVICES OFFERED Recruitment Assessment Accessing and hiring quality talent is becoming challenging in a people driven economy. economy. Toughest task is to understand the availability of talent pools, sifting through this dynamic talent pool & choosing cho osing the candidates that best fit with the job-role & organisation. Imperative for companies to get it right the first time to have healthy and productive workforce. Merit- Trac’s suite of tests is over 300 areas spanning communication skills, general abilities spanning communication skills, general abilities, domain knowledge & personality profiling.
Lateral Assessment It contains a specialized suite of tests to meet the special demands of evaluating lateral candidates Tools like Code Trac-the online software testing tool help track the skill & application of a candidate’s knowledge. Employee Assessment There is a need for periodic evaluation of employees within an organization . Assessment for Merit-Trac provides customized Employee Assessment clients that provide a validated measure of employees’ capabilities in future.
Educational Assessment
Pariksha the Education Assessment Assessment service from Merit-Trac Merit -Trac assists in making the whole examination process efficient while maintaining the highest principles of fairness & transparency. transparency.
Pariksha provides scientifically designed test content & helps deliver exams online through 21 state-of-the-art state-o f-the-art assessment centers spread across 16 cities. Pariksha provides online test delivery & offline mode with Merit-Trac’s proven capability of delivering offline assessments in over 100 cities across India.
Entry in Education Domain
Signing agreements with various State Governments-like Karnataka, West Bengal & Orissa & Kerela. Entry in this sector influenced by the fact that entry-level recruitment constitutes 17% of total recruitment market. Team-Lease employment survey states that 93% of the surveyed are recruiting people at the entry level. Most organizations are targeting the local engineering colleges for fresh talent.
Since this is a huge task & does not fall into core business, the companies are not going to do d o it themselves, this present, a huge potential to assessment companies like Merit-Trac. The company has planned to enter education domain by tying up with State Government & educational institutions.
Educational Products:
Campus-Trac
Research Reports
Campus-Trac Initiative
Tries to enhance the employability of fresh graduates from academic institutions. Program provides detailed feedback to students/colleges/ universities on strengths & weakness which aid them in bridging these skills through training interventions, thereby enhancing employability. employability. For industry partners, Campus-Trac will create a platform for fo r increasing the available talent pool in the medium term.
Trac-Skills the Certification Program for IT, IT, BPO, Services & MBA Talent Pools has assessed assessed & provided structured feedback on industry-readiness to thousands of candidates across country.
Trac-Skills are are endorsed by several companies across sectors & partners with academic institutions like Bharathiar University & VTU Under this the company has tied up with number of educational institutes.
RESEARCH REPORTS
National Index-Communication Skills Engineering Enginee ring Talent pool report
National Index-Communication Skills
The national-index communication skills (NI-CS) was an index created to map the communication skills of the talent pool pool for the BPO as a s well well as other sectors. It aimed at getting a better insight into i nto the dynamics of talent supply with respect to its communication skills. It successfully successfully built built a rich performance performa nce based data data of over 200000 perspective candidates.
Engineering Talent Report
One of the unique efforts of Merit-Trac to understand the profile of Indian engineering students, students, quantify the relevant skills, identify gaps and lastly bridge gaps if any in demand and supply of industry recruits. It objective object ive was to assess the performance performan ce of Engineerin Engi neering g students pan India and evaluate the differences in competencies that exist between diff geographic regions. The sample size for these tests was 25000 25000 candidates candidates and 800 campuses across India.
“Merit-Trac”
Present Scenario
Merit-Trac at present is India’s largest Skills assessment Company, Company, which has worked worked for 150 clients clien ts and assessed asses sed over 1.5 million candidates. It designs and delivers assessments for both bot h corporates and entrepreneurs It has established networks with a lot of leading companies like HSBC, ICICI, GLT etc.
MEG Announces Investment in Merit-Trac
In Nov 2005, Merit-Trac brought on board HSBC Private Equity where they invested US$3.8 Million . MEG also announced its investment by which they will acquire acqui re stake existing financial investor-HAV2 investor-HAV2 (Mauritius) Limited advised by HSBC and will infuse additional equity into MeritMerit Trac, leading a majority stake over 70%. With a total workforce of over 450 people, the combined entity now have executed over 2 million tests. As majority stakeholder MEG will play a strategic role & will join Board of Directors of Merit-Trac, Merit-Trac, & support its growth in newer markets & Merit-Trac Merit -Trac will operate as an independent asssessments/testing service provider. provider.
Future Challenges
Merit-Trac will now be expanding its range offerings across both the corporate & education segments, expanding its retail offerings, as well as entering newer segments. As Merit-Trac gears up to expand its presence in education domain & strengthen its position it has to find ways to close the gaps, which come from Assessments-Only position. Improve the quality of manpower & bridge this manpower gap Merit-Trac decides to enter training domain, they should do it by themselves or through joint venture with an established player in industry, industry, so that they they can keep focus & neutrality. neutrality.
