EdGE Networks:Using AI and Data Science to Streamline HR Services

EdGE Networks is a next-gen HR technology solutions provider, offering solutions to large organizations for their most pressing HR challenges. The company's strength is in harnessing AI and Data Science to solve the toughest talent acquisition and workforce optimization challenges faced by organizations.

Founded in 2012, EdGE Networks clientele includes C-suite and HR leaders looking to staff projects with talented people (from external or internal sources), quickly and without having to rely on inefficient channels of recruitment and allocation. Additionally, their tools help employees and job seekers realize their career goals and aspirations either within their organizations or outside. To enable this, the company has built a neural network of skills and jobs that learns and grows with time using their source-validate-connect algorithms running with Natural Language Processing (NLP).

EdGE Networks product offerings include:

•  HIREalchemy, an innovative Talent Acquisition Product that enables the search, rank, and recruitment of talent with amazing ease and accuracy.

•  Talent Analytics Suite that helps in predicting attrition, forecasting resource demand and more – enabling fact-based decision-making across the HR value chain.

•  Workforce Optimization Solution that forms the intelligence layer on top of HR systems and helps effective organization building.

With their Talent Transformation tool, the company helps to develop and transform talent to maximize employee potential and drive business growth. Using AI and Data Science, the tools read and understand employee profiles, recommend relevant career path and open internal jobs based on skills and past experience. The platform determines any gap between aspired career and current profile and suggests appropriate learning path to bridge the skills gap.

Pioneering Data-Driven Decision-Making in HR

The company works by enhancing internal supply visibility through a robust skills repository, enabling internal fulfillment and reducing costs incurred in external hiring. EdGE Networks help create intelligent job descriptions with appropriate keywords, lack of which is one of the key reasons for inaccurate resume matches. Auto-sourcing and the intuitive user experience of the company's platform promote self-serve recruitment by hiring managers and increases portal utilization.

This enables instant resume matches, faster job fulfillment 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 no demand cancellations and allocation failures. The company's 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 skill gaps and suggests training courses to bridge the gaps.

A Seasoned Leader Who Paved the Way for Success

Arjun Pratap, Founder & CEO of EdGE Networks is the visionary who has led the company to where it is today. Prior to EdGE Networks, he worked with organizations such as SpeedERA Networks and Akamai Technologies, where he was responsible for building their India and international businesses. Arjun also headed the sales function at Dexler Information Solutions to provide strategic direction in building the company. He began his career in Sydney, working at a startup.

Being associated with startups almost all his professional career, Arjun always wanted to do something on his own. Arjun launched his first venture, a digital platform aimed at creating a more industry-ready youth population, that would enable our country to leverage the demographic dividend. However, challenges along the way made him change direction and look at the problem statement differently. It was during his first venture that Arjun realized the scope and need for next-gen HR technology solutions – and how it would help organizations build future-ready workforces. And this led to the start of EdGE Networks.

The venture was built on the premise of a powerful search and match function and how that could alleviate search friction for people and jobs using technology. EdGE Networks started with resumes and job descriptions being the initial point with the ability to build technology to read and match the two like a fantastic hiring manager. This led to building an HR technology platform, backed by AI, Data Science, Analytics and Machine Learning that enables workforce transformation.

Happy Clients with Significant Progress

EdGE Networks works with large enterprises including Wipro, HCL, Virtusa and understands that hiring is not the only challenge they deal with. The HR systems also grapple with issues like predicting attrition, project allocation failures, which like the hiring cycle also make them lose a lot of money.

Generally, most IT businesses lose a major chunk of their costs to benched employees, while being unable to allocate a resource for a requirement in due time. On an average, it takes close to 15-16 days for multinationals to allocate a resource internally, hence losing out almost US$800,000- US$1.5 million to their customers every day.

The company's HireAlchemy platform reads an employee's structured and unstructured data to find the right match for a requirement internally. Their Talent Analytics Suite helps in predicting attrition, forecasting resource demand and much more.

A few stats that the company has inferred while working with some of the leading MNCs by using their platforms shows:

•  96% improvement in hiring cycle

•  4 times improvement in supply visibility

•  58% reduction in hiring cost for the MNCs

•  51% reduction in hiring allocation failures

•  36% increase in internal job allocation

Awards and Recognition

The journey has been very rewarding, and EdGE Networks has won several prestigious awards and recognition. World's No. 1 tech giant, Google has seen the potential of their work in the field and selected the company as one of the six Indian AI startups for its Launchpad Accelerator Program (batch 4) in 2017. EdGE Networks has been awarded the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards India consecutively in 2016 and 2017. EdGE has also won the Deloitte-MIDAS Award 2016, which opened new gates for them to foray into the UK market. The company won UK's India Emerging Twenty (IE20) Awards by London & Partners in 2017. These are a few of the notable ones from a long list of proud moments.

Learning from the Challenges

EdGE Networks began their journey by competing against Oracle, Microsoft and LinkedIn of the world to acquire the intelligent hiring and workforce optimization business in one of India's largest IT companies. The company almost failed as they had no customer reference and many skeptics (for good reason). "If we had failed in that attempt, we might not have been around as the initial years' burn rate for a startup is quite significant," says Arjun.