Zoho Makes Its First Acquihire To Strengthen Hiring Solutions

Chennai-based SaaS startup, Zoho has acqui-hired an automated hiring product startup, ePoise Systems, for an undisclosed amount. The deal also included the acquisition of ePoise’s intellectual property rights.

Commenting on the acquisition, Shailesh Kumar Davey, vice president of Zoho Corporation said, “While making an acquisition, we look for the cultural fit as well as the product and technology fit.  Zoho offers Zoho Recruit and Zoho People, products in the HR space. ePoise technology may get used in these products.”

ePoise Systems was cofounded by Sachin Agrawal and Bishan Singh in 2013. The Bengaluru-based startup offers an automated hiring software product targeted at mass recruiting companies. The product also has a series of pre-designed screening steps for various company profiles. Along with a set of assessments which finally lead to an automated video interview.

Indian startup, Zoho has more than 40 integrated online applications aiding multiple business operations such as sales and marketing, finance, email and collaboration, information technology and help desk, human resources and custom solutions like app creator and analytics.

Boost To Zoho’s Existing HR Products

With the acquisition of ePoise Systems, Zoho would be adding higher automation capabilities to its human resource centric products. The two existing human resource products in Zoho’s stack are Zoho Recruit and Zoho People.

Zoho Recruit is an all-in-one applicant tracking system (ATS) software for managing company’s recruiting processes. This Zoho’s product can be used to streamline candidate sourcing, applicants tracking, interview scheduling, communication, and hiring functions in a single system.

Further, Zoho People is a centralized hub that covers multiple human resource management operations. It allows employees to report times from mobile devices, check their schedules, ask for time-offs, or communicate with  the manager and their peers through the mobile device.

Zoho Corporation was founded by Sridhar Vembu 1996 and now has offices across seven countries including, US, Netherlands, Singapore, UAE, Japan, and, China. Company is headquartered in California, with international headquarters in Chennai, India.

Zoho claimed to have more than 45 Mn global users and is profitable with over 7K employees. Company does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, due to user privacy concerns. Also, the company had been bootstrapped since its inception.

In 2017, the Chennai-based company has launched a new business operating system Zoho One. It is an all-in-one suite of applications to run an entire business across every function and organisational group. The suite is offered with a single sign-on and with centralised administration and provisioning at a price of $30 or INR 1,000 per month, per employee.

Other players in the Indian SaaS industry include Freshworks, Wingify, Five Second Test and Convert. Globally, the company competes with stalwarts such as SAP, Zendesk, and Salesforce.