ITCONS provides complete Staffing & Recruitment solutions along with cutting edge technology. ITCONS e-Solutions developed “Recruitment Relationship Management suite”; the application that empowers companies to automate and streamline their recruitment and Staffing business processes resulting into higher productivity, lesser cost and hence a stronger top and bottom line.
ITCONS CEO, Gaurav Mittal spoke to us.

What is in the Name?

ITCONS is into development of software products meant for Recruitment Space with an aim of becoming business and technology leader in Recruitment solutions space. ITCONS builds software tools that empowers and allows companies of all size (small, mid and large) to automate, streamline and optimize their Recruitment and Staffing processes resulting into increased productivity and better efficiency of the sourcing team, lower TCO and hence stronger top/bottom lines.

The applications of the ITCONS are not only meant for Staffing and executive Search Agencies but also for Corporate too. More than just an Applicant Tracking System, the Solutions are powered and packaged with Resume Parser (converting unstructured candidate data from various file formats into structured data), Applicant Tracking using keyword and Intelligent concept search, Billing Management, Vendor Management, Timesheet Entry System, Communication Management, Reporting and Scheduling etc into one powerful and affordable tool called as “Recruitment Relationship Management Suite”. It provides corporate and staffing companies to harness the power of centralized database in a distributed environment.

How & why did you come up this business concept?

We explored the various options like BPO’s, KPO’s, LPO’s and came upon RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) as the next big word. It was a market estimated to be worth $28 billion, the market potential for the employed tools with $1.5 billion.
Though our intention was to work where our core expertise lay software development; since we were not an established firm, hence we found recruitment to be a good start point. When we had started working with recruitment, we came across the sample problem that the industry faced: managing a vast database of resumes and retrieving specific resumes as per criteria and felt the need for software that can manage data and retrieve the right resume based on specified criteria. We found no good applications, here in India or globally to meet the Indian requirement, so we considered this as a business opportunity to develop the tool ourselves. We strive to be ERP for Recruitment market; Bid good bye to legacy and conventional ways of resume management.

How are your funded?

So far, we are a self funded company but looking forward for Angel/VC funding to take the product to the new heights in the global market.

What is your present revenue figure?

We started our operations in July 2007, since then we have touched the top line figure of INR 50L+; we hope year 2009 will bring more opportunities for us. Making the product available on SAAS model is one such step to lead toward the desired goal; we hope we shall be able to touch a top line of $1-1.5M during calendar year 2009.

About the team behind the venture?

 My core team comprises of five members including me. Ujjwal Prakash, who leads Business development efforts and software projects, has over 17yrs of experience in managing technology for business process solutions. He has been involved in Application & Application Framework Design, Distributed Loosely Coupled component based architecture using SOA, Design and Code Re-factoring with Design Patterns & UML, Object and Database modeling etc. Swati and Renu ( Director), with over 15yrs of experience in business needs assessment, process management, cost analysis, and leveraging emerging technologies to deliver bottom-line savings and customer, handle marketing, presentation, customer relations and identifying potential partners in India and US respectively. Manoj carries 18+ Yrs of rich experience and is taking care of office admin and HR.

Whom are you targeting?

All of our products are meant for Recruitment industry. Irrespective a company being small or big player, they need manpower; our products are meant for managing the candidates’ resumes. In nut shell, any company which requires manpower or a company which provides that manpower (Recruitment firms) are our potential clients. Our product manages internal database of potential candidates by reducing the manual efforts.

Who are your competitors? how are you different from them.

We are not worried too much about competition, as we have established ourselves on the leader board. Immediate competition in domestic market is with players like HireCraft, CBIZONE and ResumeFox etc. File finder, Taleo, Recruitmax, HireAbility, Sendouts, BigBiller are the major competitors in international market. Our USP is that we enable recruitment at a lower cost by way of an innovative product that drastically reduces manpower and empowers the job-seeker by having his skills recognized. Our new clients who were previously using our competitors’ products have told us about the lack of functionality in other products and have opted for us. Our new offering is Intelligent Concept Search – ICS (based on auto taxonomy, words semantics), which no competitor is able to offer so far.

What is your revenue model?

 We get the revenue by the sales of our proprietary software products. We also offer enterprise application development services. One such example of our creativity is a social networking site called www.iamne.in, which has recently been launched.
Our products will eventually solve problems (conversion of unstructured data into structured one) on a global perspective irrespective of industries; hence there is a big market scope thus generating more revenues.

How has the going been so far? And what are your goals next 2 years?

For product development companies, Initial focus is on technology, enhancing functionalities etc, so was with us too. Since now our products are rich enough in functionalities required by the market, more focus is on improving the GUI and marketing activities. The goal for the next 2 years is to be the market leader at least in India with a global presence in US, UK and Australia market.

What challenges do you see for your growth?

We don’t see competition as a challenge since we are confident about our product (This comment is based on the existing clients’ feedback and people taking demo of the product). The major challenge, which I foresee is because of the market slow down, because of which companies defer their plan to buy new products. The other major challenge is to arrange funding to have a good presence in global market.

How do you plan to promote this?

I would not like to put much light on our exact marketing strategies, but yes, we are exploring all best possible ways to promote our product/services starting with SEO, SCM and media etc. There is a lot going on, on this front.

How would you like to improvise?

One thing about the Product is that one can never say that it’s the end of the story. It’s always evolving based on market needs, clients’ requirements and feedback. Our marketing and sales teams keep in touch with clients and keep taking their feedback on regular basis. If a similar need is expected by multiple clients, it then becomes the enhanced functionality of the product. In regard to the business model, recently we have launched the hosted model of one of our applications called “RecruitPlus”. Users can use the product on monthly subscription model at a throw away price without incurring any capital expense on purchase of hardware, software licenses etc. The best part is that there is no long term commitment required from the client