SUMMARY
Both startups work in helping tech companies find the right engineering, design talent
Post-acquisition, the platforms will run independently
GoScale has a primary presence in India and Southeast Asia
Delaware-based GoScale Group, which has offices in Bengaluru and Hyderabad as well, has acquired Washington DC-headquartered tech freelance platform Indiez. Speaking to Inc42, GoScale’s CEO Raghu Bharat said that the acquisition of Indiez increases the reach of its tech talent community platform.
Post-acquisition, Indiez founders and core team will be joining GoScale. “Indiez will continue to run independently and existing clients and candidates will continue working with the company,” Bharat added.
Founded by Nitesh Agarwal in 2016, Indiez is an online platform which helps companies hire the best tech talent. Companies such as Uber, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify are clients of Indiez. It claims to be profitable since its operations began in 2016. The startup was also bootstrapped for a year before it raised $500K in seed funding.
On the other hand, GoScale, which was founded by Bharat, Dheeraj Lalchandani, Shubhanshu Srivastava, and Nirmaan Agarwal, also helps tech companies around the world hire the right fit of professionals. Amazon, Uber, Grab, Swiggy, Tokopedia, Ola among others are some of the notable clients of GoScale.
As of now, GoScale has a primary presence in India and Southeast Asia, whereas Indiez has built a large tech community platform with engineers mostly from the US. As both the companies are operating in the same segment, the acquisition will them to leverage each others platform and develop an extensive network of tech talent. “We see a lot of synergy between Goscale and Indiez. We share a common vision and our values align,” said Bharat.
Bharat said that this move greatly increases GoScale’s operational capabilities globally. “Together, the community has now over 16K developers, designers, and product managers across 50 countries. We want to expand our community to over 100K, reach more geographies and boost our operations in the US,” he added.
The acquisition will also help GoScale increase employment opportunities for existing talent on their platform by leveraging the client base of Indiez. “Our developer community will thrive as well because we can offer better work opportunities,” Bharat added.
In 2019, GoScale had launched its own recruitment platform CrewScale which helps clients to hire individuals who can work remotely for the company. The acquisition of Indiez will also help the company to bolster its CrewScale platform as well. Post the acquisition, Indiez and CrewScale will have over 300 customers who are using their platform to hire quality remote engineers.
How GoScale Selects Talent?
One of the major problems with freelance or recruitment platforms is that the skills of individuals are not verified by the platforms before they are added to a profile. GoScale uses a native tech assessment platform called Talscale.
Bharat claims that Talscale assesses the candidates on over 100 skills as well as project-based assessments coupled with coding interviews. “We handpick our potential engineers. On average, 1 out of 10 engineers clears our vetting process. Once the candidate clears these rounds and the following reference checks, they are a part of our community,” he added.
Project-based assessments and evaluating candidates on situations help the company ensure that the right talent with the required domain expertise and relevant work experience is matched with the employer’s needs. GoScale invites developers that have at least two years of prior experience to join the community. The company claims that it works with only the top 1% candidates as a part of its community. Bharat said that most of the engineers selected by GoScale come from premier engineering colleges such as IITs.
GoScale says it wants to ensure that selected engineers get a continuous pipeline of projects to avoid the uncertainty usually associated with freelancing. “We provide candidates with the best opportunities which are not available across traditional job boards or sources,” Bharat added.
Tech Bringing Remote Employees Closer
With the easy availability of high-speed internet and meeting software, companies around the world are adjusting to the right candidates working remotely. “Location is no longer a limitation, remote workforce and distributed development are accelerating innovation,” Bharat said.
The transition is also fuelled by platforms such as GoScale that have started to taking ownership and rewarding performance. Within the recruitment and talent assessment space, the transition from a marketplace model to a managed model is clear and this is further promoting the concept of remote working in the digital era. “The talent agencies are stepping up and taking more responsibility as companies seek low-risk development models,” Bharat adds.
Recently, a lot of companies have switched to operating a distributed company with workers all over the world. Some prominent examples are Invision, Gitlab, Stripe and GitHub which have either completed shifted to the remote model or have set up a division which works remotely for them.
GoScale competes with other freelancers recruitment platforms such as TopTal, Upwork, Freelancer and Gigster. However, Bharat believes that GoScale’s approach and value proposition is slightly different as it aims to provide its engineers with an opportunity to get the right value for their work.
The company claims to be profitable since its inception. It also claims to be growing at 200% year-on-year growth. In 2019, they have increased their core team by 150 from 40. During the same period, the company claims that it was able to increase its revenue by 6X. GoScale also registered a 15% to 20% month-on-month growth rate last year.
