Bengaluru: Swapnil Vats, founder of recruitment start-up Valonia (Valonia Learning and Recruiting Solutions LLP), wrote last year on his LinkedIn profile that he was looking for a JavaScript developer. A start-up that wants to make the hiring process easier for others, looking for developers on other platforms – is it a one-off or the norm?

Vats said that, as an early-stage start-up with a four-member team (of which two employees were hired through hackathons that are the company’s unique selling proposition, or USP), he cannot ignore larger and established recruitment platforms. “I don’t think platforms like LinkedIn or AngelList are going to go away. We want to grow, so we’re looking for people across many platforms, including hackathons," he said.

Jobick, another mobile-focused recruitment start-up has about seven people, and its founder Ravi Wadhwa has so far hired from his own professional network. “When you’re a very early start-up, it is common to hire from other portals. Once you scale and get enough profiles in your database you start to hire from your own platform," he said.

But what about other start-ups that have been around for a while?

Manjunath Talwar, chief executive officer, Hiree, said that as many recruitment start-ups serve particular niches, they tend to look for talent on other platforms, and that this was fairly common.

However, hiring through their own platform has great benefits, said Tarun Matta, chief executive officer, iimjobs.

“It helps from a culture standpoint because when we have employees coming from iimjobs, we don’t have to tell them about the product. They’re already a user of the product, they like it at some level, and there’s already a relationship with the product and the company. Also, it gives us an opportunity to test our own product and see how successful it is and refine it."

Mint spoke to five hiring tech start-ups to find out where they source their talent from.

HackerRank (Interviewstreet Inc.)

Founded: 2012

Investment received: $19.9 million

Companies who use HackerRank: Facebook, Yahoo!, Adobe.

Number of employees: 120

Number of employees hired through its own platform: 30 (entire engineering team)

USP: Has about a million competitive coders on its platform CodeSprint. Monetises by allowing companies to set up coding challenges on its HackerRank for Work, which automatically evaluates the code a programmer submits and ranks the submissions, making the filtering process easier. Recently launched a simplified job portal for programmers.

Hiree (Abhiman Technologies Pvt Ltd)

Founded: 2014

Investment received: $ 3.33 million

Companies who use Hiree: Wipro Ltd, Accenture Ltd, L&T Infotech

Number of employees: 110

Number of employees hired through its own platform: 50

USP: Verifies job candidates, and provides information of only active jobseekers that match requirements, weeding out profiles that are older than 90 days.

HackerEarth (HackerEarth Inc.)

Founded: 2014

Investment received: $500,000

Companies who use HackerEarth: @WalmartLabs, ThoughtWorks, Intuit, MetricStream

Number of employees: 75

Number of employees hired through its own platform: 25 (90% of the engineering team)

USP: Candidates are pre-filtered through challenges and tests; has remote video interviewing capabilities.

iimjobs (Highorbit Career Pvt. Ltd)

Founded: 2008

Investment received: Undisclosed amount in an angel round

Companies who use iimjobs: Hindustan Unilever Ltd, ICICI Bank Ltd, Credit Suisse AG

Number of employees: 80

Number of employees hired its own platform: 80

USP: Functions as a listing portal for jobs, like Naukri, Shine, Timesjobs, but claims to focus on ‘premium’ mid-to-senior management level jobs and a simpler recruitment process through the portal.

Belong (Belong Technologies India Pvt. Ltd)

Founded: 2014

Investment received: $5 million

Companies who use Belong: Snapdeal, Ola, Practo Number of employees: 75

Number of employees hired through its own platform: 37

USP: Helps companies hire from a ‘passive’ talent pool by analysing a prospective candidate’s profile on social media platforms and other public sources using predictive analytics.

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