Mercer To Bet On Global Talent Assessment Market With Mettl Acquisition

Mettl, one of the leading organisations in global cloud-based technology and data sciences-driven talent assessments has announced its acquisition by Mercer, a global consulting company in advancing health, wealth and career and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.

Avendus was the exclusive financial advisor to Mettl for the deal.

Established in 2010, Mettl was co-founded by Tonmoy Shingal and Ketan Kapoor. It helps companies maximise human potential by measuring talent using precise, multilingual assessments conducted via its secure and scalable software as a service (SaaS) platform and by utilising big data analytics.

The platform includes proprietary content to measure personality, ability and job-specific skills by providing content across psychometric assessments, aptitude tests and IT/Non-IT domain tests. Mettl also licenses its platform as a stand-alone technology for clients’ own content.

Mettl is assisting over 2000 global companies, 24 Sector Skill Councils and 15 educational institutes across 80+ countries. It was also retained as an assessment provider by the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MSDE) for the Skill Development Initiative (SDI).

Mettl Plus Mercer: A Tool To Unlock Potential Of People

According to Ilya Bonic, global president of Mercer’s Career line of business, the acquisition marks Mercer’s entry into the rapidly-growing global talent assessment market and further enhances its position as a trusted strategic talent advisor to companies.

“Online talent assessment is a powerful tool that helps companies unlock the potential of their people. Mettl is a disruptive HR tech startup that has pioneered a robust assessments platform,” said Anish Sarkar, CEO, India, Mercer.

He further believes that the combination of Mercer’s pedigree and talent industry experience in India and Mettl’s leading-edge and scalable proprietary technology platform will enable companies in India to improve their workforce as they prepare for the future of work amidst rapid digitisation.

Ketan Kapoor, CEO, Mettl added, “By leveraging Mercer’s global footprint and leadership position, we can sustainably scale our presence and reach, helping companies avoid the cost of suboptimal hiring decisions amidst ongoing digital disruption.”

Mercer is currently operational in more than 130 countries. With nearly 65,000 colleagues and annual revenue over $14 Bn, Marsh & McLennan helps clients navigate an increasingly dynamic and complex environment.

Local Players Joining The Bandwagon

As an industry, talent assessment has seen a number of new players coming up with unique business models in the past few years.

One such player is Monjin, an on-demand interview platform. This Pune-based startup uses digital and video assessment to let candidates showcase their skills and personality, and helps organizations find the right hire.

This self-funded organisation is a full-spectrum, cloud-based platform which leverages the ‘sharing economy’ principle to bring convenience and better experience to candidates and significantly reduces the recruitment cost and time benefits to enterprises by 30-80%. Currently operational in India, UK and USA, Monjin aims to bridge the gaps present in the hiring industry and aims to reach USD 4 Mn in valuation by the end of 2019.

Then there is Noble House, an HR talent marketplace that helps independent consultants find short- and long-term assignments as per their skill set. By making the entire continuum of finding work and hiring independent consultants more approachable and lucrative for freelancers and businesses, respectively, the venture is transforming how HR works – thus aligning itself with the idea of a “gig economy” very well.

Next is Spotle.ai an AI-powered, multilingual, real-time talent network that matches talents directly with the top hirers and hirers with the right talents. Spotle.ai uses machine learning, NLP, predictive modelling and analyses a professional’s moving career graph and aspirations. The smart interface lets users simply right swipe on the professionals or opportunities that they are interested in.

Wheebox, Centum Learning, Interview Mocha, HackerRank, are a few startups among others which are quite popular in the HR talent assessment segment. A few established players in this segment are Talview, HireVue, Pymetrics and Vervoe among others.

The assessment services market is projected to cross $750 Mn by 2021 in India as per a May 2018 report by Research and markets.  Overall, as per June 2017 report by research firm Grand View Research, Inc, the global workforce analytics market is expected to reach $1.87 Bn by 2025.