Exclusive Interview with Piyush Raj Akhouri, Co-Founder and Business Head, Bridgentech

The hiring process has seen so much progress in recent years. Technology has made it possible to sort thousands of applications and finalize the candidate within no time. However, HR agencies and companies often find it difficult to hire a person who is the perfect fit for the job role. Artificial intelligence can take the game a notch up by letting the hiring managers see what the person is really worth. Bridgentech, an AI-based staffing solution aims to help companies reach out to the right people in their mission to find their future family. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Piyush Raj Akhouri, Co-Founder and Business Head, of Bridgentech.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services it offers?

BridgenTech is an emerging contract-to-hire IT Team Augmentation Startup with strong roots in Western Europe, the Americas, and India. Leveraging our in-house technology platform for talent discovery and assessment, we provide end-to-end hiring support to our clients, who are IT Products and Services firms of all sizes. We combine the best practices of contractual IT project outsourcing with strategic IT recruitment, sourcing the global elite IT Talent.

BridgenTech was founded in 2018 and innovated through a proprietary 5F sourcing strategy framework (Focus, Find, Filter, Fit, and Flex) and in-house technology tool Hire++ to ensure strong adherence to client needs and values, without compromising on speed, sharpness, and surety.

We 'Focus' on hiring strategy whether a business need requires a short-term or long-term solution for team growth; we 'Find' the best candidates by assessing beyond just resumes and skillsets; we 'Filter' applicants through a rigorous assessment mechanism; we find the best "Fit" while keeping in mind requirements such as necessary tech, language, and cultural training, skillset workshops, and adequate project management; and we "Flex" our delivery models depending on client needs, such as a custom delivery plan and resource migration. BridgenTech aims to solve corporate IT resource augmentation problems through trust-based hiring.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

Our company was founded in 2018 when we combined our Indo-European IT delivery expertise from France, Germany, and India. All three founders, including myself, could see the gaps in remote staffing, contract hiring, and the challenges top-tier skilled resources in India faced in realizing their dreams of working with big brands in the West. At the same time, European firms were mostly struggling to find that needle in a haystack resource who would be the right skilled candidate, tailored to their needs. We wanted to be the link between these two worlds, which is how Bridgentech was born.

We have opened many offices over the years and now have branches in India, US, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Germany.

We have been assisting business and IT teams of all sizes in gaining access to elite global IT talent from India and other countries by uniquely combining remote staffing, IT delivery, skill assessment, and recruitment processes into one customizable service tailored to our clients' needs.

Our mission has always been about making the right employees with deserving employees and vice versa. We help our clients to stay ahead of the curve by improving in-house development activities through trust-based hiring, seamlessly integrating the practices of contractual staffing, solution delivery, and recruitment into a custom-fit solution.

3. Brief us about the proactive founder/ CEO of the company and his/her contributions to the company and the industry.

With over 14+ years of extensive experience in successfully leading businesses across industries including Manufacturing, SaaS & IT Services, and across geographies including West Europe, US, UK & Asia, Piyush, Marc, and Deepika Collaborated to combine their skills to create a product-led service platform. They were able to achieve this success because of my education pedigree with a bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, Manipal, and an MBA in International Business from SPJIMR, Mumbai, and European School of Business, Reutlingen, Germany

4. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

Bridgentech distinguishes itself from its competitors through a variety of features. However, the most notable are:

• Capability to serve customers faster and with greater accuracy and quality: A proprietary 5F framework assists employers in gaining access to top IT talent in development, operations, data, and evolving cognitive services.
• BRIDGENTECH resources receive knowledge transfer on technology gaps, intercultural and language training, and client needs. Even the transition plans between BRIDGENTECH and the Client have been finalized to minimize risks and ensure employee growth.
• A novel and novel risk-sharing pricing model: BRIDGENTECH does not charge its clients until the candidate is finalized. After being chosen, both parties decide on and agree on blended offshore rates.

5. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

1. We are planning to start operations in the North American and South American markets and have plans to open offices in the US as well as Sao Paulo, Brazil by the end of this year

2. Observing the rapid adoption and growth in the domain of cloud, we plan to focus more on a cloud-based platform like Azure, AWS, and GCP thereby creating demand for excellent developers, operations personnel, and managers

3. We are excited to work with large mid-size IT teams as well as focused tech start-ups, with decentralized management, so that decisions can happen fast, and sync better with the dynamics of the changing IT services industry. This will also help us to achieve our vision of having 250+ employees by the end of 2022

6. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

We use Technology practices to discover and deliver the right talent to the right people. With the launch of our core product Hire++ open to businesses for the Beta Launch, this year will mark many new(s) in the industry, as a contribution from Bridgentech. With hiring slowing down in a couple of months ahead, the product will be especially useful for users to filter the best of the lot for their projects.  In the coming months, we will be adding many more supporting features like sentiment analysis on interview participants, as part of our output reports.

7. What are the key trends driving the growth in Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning?

In the age of information and digital transformation, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be a disruptive force. AI has taken multiple industries and internal business processes by storm, along with its subcategories of machine learning and deep learning. According to a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) survey, 30% of respondents believe AI will be the biggest disrupter to their industry in the next five years. Many of the foundations that enable digital transformation are being influenced by AI, making AI and machine learning expertise invaluable for technology teams hoping to stay ahead of industry change. People are investing more and more in AI, jobs in AI are increasing and customer service becomes easier with AI-driven technology.

8. How are disruptive technologies like AI/Machine Learning/Cloud Computing impacting today's innovation?

The technology of AI/ Machine Learning/ cloud computing is reducing the iterative and monotonous processes, thus reducing Manual Labour and freeing skills for more innovative works. Automation enables faster engagements between service elements, with better task monitoring and keeping the developers informed on the progress. This enables lesser errors and quicker resolutions.

Practically all domains are imbibing AI, be it HR, finance, or IT. New requirements lead to a need for more skilled staff in the AI Domain.  This, therefore, becomes a driver of growth, as more people join the tide and join the industry with skills in analytics and innovation. Almost all sectors, from IT to finance and HR are adopting AI. This will create more AI-related jobs in the future.  Forbes reported that jobs requiring AI skills have been increasing 4.5x in the last five years. The impact will be felt heaviest in the data science field: 80 percent of data scientists will have deep learning in their toolkits this year, according to Gartner.

9. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

We can divide this into two parts. Firstly, Innovation in Process through Technology:  we have merged Technology with seamless integration with our talent discovery processes for vetting the profiles, cold reach outs, onboarding, and regular monitoring. Traditionally this space has been very less disrupted by technology being heavily people-dependent. By bringing in automation in certain processes, and leveraging top-of-the-line AI Tools, we can do tasks at scale, saving effort and resources without compromising on technology. 

The second aspect is more about remaining low-code and having a multi-tenant, multi-cloud architecture. This enables us to bring in new features and product updates in the least possible time, without impacting the product usage or interfering with users.  Both these Technology dependent aspects cater to a much larger set of requirements for a larger set of clients and give unprecedented outputs. As BridgenTech assists primarily in two areas, IT Engineering & IT Operations for cloud technologies; we help in supporting our clients to stay ahead of the curve by recruiting the talent for fast-evolving technologies, faster than others. In some cases, we also provide Staff Augmentation and Managed Services support. Our in-house AI-driven platform helps us filter the profiles in minutes, and we have combined the best of human-artificial intelligence in our live assessment process, which can be leveraged from anywhere, therefore we can provide support to any client in any country with capable resources from anywhere, as long as the delivery remains remote or Hybrid.

The company aims to enable businesses worldwide to imbibe new technologies through happy, motivated, and skilled manpower, enabling the right matchmaking between deserving employees and employers.