Client Profile.
The client is a Californian company operating in the recruitment space and offering the entire spectrum of employment services from job portals and head hunting to resume writing and mass mails.
Business Need.
To power its job portal, the company captured and aggregated online jobs from every conceivable source from around the world and showcased them on their portal for job seekers. They partnered with Hitech to help them:
- Significantly scale up the volumes of jobs available on the portal,
- Accelerate the pace of new jobs showing up on the site,
- Ensure that jobs were captured from trusted sources,
- Always have relevant and updated jobs available on the site.
Over time, the scope of work saw a huge expansion. Not just did the volume of jobs scale up, but the activities to sustain and grow operations increased. The company then requested a transition of business model which would allow them:
- Greater control over their offshore operations
- Scale at an accelerated pace
- Hire a cross-functional team to support expansion plans
- Keep control over operational costs
Challenges.
The project management team encountered several challenges as they put together a roadmap for successful project implementation. These included:
- Complexity of integrating data from multiple sources, each with their unique formats and structures
- Ensuring the accuracy and completeness of job listings and filtering out irrelevant or inconsistent data
- Developing scalable workflow and infrastructure to address the projected exponential growth
- Working on custom tools and technologies to automate the data capture process
Solution.
A dedicated data acquisition team was set up to address the omnichannel data capture needs of the job portal. The scope of work and number of projects gradually increased with the increase in client’s confidence in the Hitech’s team to deliver. The augmented list of projects included data validation and standardization, software development and maintenance, graphic design, and digital marketing.
Over time, dedicated support functions for HR, Admin, Technical Support and Finance were added. The client’s offshore office was registered as a legal Indian entity, the employee strength grew to 750+ and once the client company’s abilities to independently operations was established, the company was transferred to the client.
Here is a phase-by-phase account of how the project transformed into a global capability center with a Build, Operate & Transfer (BOT) model.
The Build Phase: Project Setup
- A team of process associates was hired; our recruiters applied screening criteria such as search capabilities, keyboard speed, attention to detail and comprehension abilities.
- The team was imparted job-related training on web research techniques, understanding of structures of different job sites, legal and ethical considerations for web scraping, navigating the restrictions imposed by certain sites etc.
The Operate Phase: Implementation and Rapid Expansion
Project Expansion
- Detailed workflow was designed to classify jobs according to sources, complexity, types, geographies etc. and assign them to resources accordingly for seamless execution.
- Jobs data captured from a huge range of sources and types and entered in relevant fields in a pre-defined database.
- Over time as the project grew in strength and gained the client’s attention, Team India was also assigned the task of job editing, validating, standardizing and enriching the jobs with missing fields before flagging them in live status for job seeker view.
- Custom web crawlers and bots were developed for parsing jobs from certain portals. Proxy servers and rotating IPs prevented IP blocking.
- With the increase in project size, maintenance of the portal shifted to India and was assigned to a few software developers. The software team itself grew in strength to 100+ developers with maintenance and value-add development work on existing portals and new software development for a huge number of other job sites.
- Other projects added to the bucket included resume writing, web content development, graphic design, and digital marketing.
Infrastructure and Resource Expansion
- Scaled up non-technical infrastructure, including office space, facility management, administrative and liaising support and managing books of accounts.
- Advanced, scalable technological infrastructure deployed with dedicated servers, computers, network solutions, communication systems etc. Ensured robust data security measures.
- Dedicated recruitment team set up to meet the ongoing high volume resource requirements across functions and skills.
- Organized people management functions which included payroll, employee engagement, performance management etc.
The Transfer Phase. Ownership Handed Over.
- With the smooth and seamless running of operations and with client’s confidence on being able to run the operations independently, the ownership and full control of the Indian operations was handed over to the US company.
- The Indian operations were registered as a legal Indian entity of the US company.
- All resources were moved to the payroll of the client.
- Detailed knowledge transfer, extensive training, trial operations and a shadowing period ensure smooth transfer.
Business Impact.
70% offshoring builds flexibility
50+ US locations seamlessly coordinated
20x resource scalability
