Exclusive Interview with Ravish Agarwal, Founder and CEO at Able Jobs

The job market is an ever-evolving platform as the latest trends determine how one can look for a job and how one should be prepared for it. Able Jobs is a company that provides excellent training courses and connects the learners with various companies to get jobs. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ravish Agarwal who is the founder and CEO of Able Jobs to know more about the innovative techniques and disruptive technologies that are being used in the company.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Able Jobs trains entry-level job seekers for roles in sales and support. Job seekers download our app then go through our training courses and post completion of the course we connect them to companies and get them jobs. We are solving the problem of employability for non-tech graduates. Every year more than 6Mn+ people graduate with -technical degrees like BA, BBA but struggle to get a job. Our rigorous in-house designed training program ensures that fresh graduates learn the required skill to get the job. The courses are highly vocational and are delivered online with the help of experienced trainers.

Designing the right pedagogy so that we can remove the subjectivity from non-tech jobs has been one of the biggest challenges initially. Over time we have closely worked with students and companies to understand the key gaps and designed content, proprietary frameworks, and assessment that helps us evaluate a candidate in-depth and provide them the skill required for the job.  Our app ensures that the content is delivered perfectly and job seekers can get the skills required for a job. Able Jobs is based in Bangalore and we started in May 2019.

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

We were coaching BA, BBA, B. Com people for college exams. That is when we realized that most people struggle to get a job. Therefore we thought to help these people get jobs and started training them for jobs directly. Initially, we taught people on phone, then we taught people on WhatsApp, and finally, after some placements, we launched the Able Jobs app to help students prepare for the job

We are 3 founders and we have all known each other for the last 7 years. We started as a weekend project and slowly evolved it into what you see as Able Jobs. All three founders have worked for an ed startup before and we are super passionate about how the internet can be used for socio-economic upliftment in the next decade. We are a team of a total of 25+ people from diverse backgrounds including IIT, IIM, Teach for India, and more.

3. How is AI evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

AI models are becoming smarter every day and with low computational costs, even early-stage startups are able to use the potential and create disruptive tools for old age sectors. Voice is going to be one of the most important frontiers in the coming years. The main factor for this shift towards voice user interfaces is changing user demands. There is an increased awareness and a higher level of comfort demonstrated specifically by Genz, millennial consumers as they want to

do things faster. While for adults voice provides an easier way to access things. Big tech firms also helped with launching new products to make voice accessibility and integrations easier.

4. How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian market and what are your plans to tap the market?

With Able Jobs, we are on a mission to eradicate unemployment. Two Crore graduates enter into the workforce every year. We want to be the go-to destination for entry-level job preparation for these students. Right now we are focusing on certain job roles like sales and support, as we move forward in our journey we will increase our scope to all the entry-level roles like an accountant, digital marketing, talent acquisition, and many more.  We are building effective tools that facilitate users for self and group practice on the app, provide them automatic feedback so that they can improve, build confidence and get closer to the job.

5. Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in key sectors?

Work from home jobs is here to stay. With a lot of companies extending their work from home timelines and others planning to move a significant workforce to remote working, companies will need ready trained talent, since onboarding and training will be less intensive as compared to in-office setup. We believe that our program inculcates the right job skills to get a person started for work without any additional training.

6. How is your company utilizing advanced analytics and big data?

Users perform exercises on the app and that helps us capture a holistic view of our learner's profile. The data helps us build the best model for suggesting people's jobs. Using that data we have launched India's first audio job recommendation on the Able jobs app last month. User records their audio, gives them a score using our proprietary AI model, and then suggests jobs best suited to their communication skills.

7. Do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

Yes, the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry. This is because the practical job-ready skills required to get jobs are not taught in our college. Most non-technical graduates struggle for jobs even after 6-12 months of graduation. Most people have to apply to hundreds of companies before getting their first job. During this process, they end up learning what it actually takes to get a job. At Able jobs, we make the whole process very simple and get them jobs 12X faster.

8. Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/Analytics space?

We have used AI actively to build a real-time feedback loop for our students. Here are a couple of projects that we are working on:

• Voice assessment and scoring through deep learning: Entry-level hiring requires interviewers to go on a call to understand the communication of the candidate. At Able Jobs, we have automated that using deep learning techniques. We have created a deep learning model that predicts with utmost accuracy the fluency of the communication skills of a person. Most of the models including the existing voice recognition models do not work for Indian accents since they are created primarily for the western use case. This is the first of its kind model for recognizing the Indian accent.
• Automated feedback in subjective answers through deep learning: At Able Jobs, we teach people sales and support skills which are daily subjective in nature. There could be multiple answers to a question like how to sell a pen or how to treat an angry customer which makes it difficult to give feedback to students. We are training tens of thousands of students every month and in order to give them the best learning experience, we have designed a deep learning model which provides feedback on subjective answers in seconds. Users can do exercises on the app, submit the answers and get paragraphs of feedback to improve their learning.