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Mumbai-based job referral platform, Happy2Refer, has raised $250K in an angel round of funding from Equity Crest, Vinners and Sparknext as well as from a host of individual investors.
The raised capital will used in ramping up the product, algorithms, enhancing user experience and marketing.
Launched in September, 2015 by Nimit Bavishi, Harshit Bavisi and Mitesh Jain, Happy2Refer, is a first-of-its-kind referral hiring app. Through its intelligence systems – ‘Smart Refer’, it connects to a referrer’s networks and recommends who in the network is a great fit for a particular role.
To enhance engagement, Happy2Refer also comes with a loyalty program with reward partners such as Amazon.
“Our vision is to turn everyone into a referrer/recruiter on-the-go”, said Mitesh, who leads tech at Happy2Refer. He also said that in India, where the staffing industry is sized at $4.2 Bn and has a growth rate of 27% annually, less than one in 10 people are hired through referrals despite it being 10x more effective.
Speaking on the development, Nimit Bavishi, founder at Happy2Refer said, “We have built a disruptive model that creates a viral win-win experience. If you work in pharma sales, you are best suited to understand a pharma sales job requirement. Ideally, you should be empowered to discover and refer 5 great-fit people from your network in 30 seconds and get rewarded if your referral makes it. People can earn 20-30% of their annual salary more from making the right referrals, which gives HR a pool of high-quality curated profiles to look at.”
Besides Happy2Refer, other startups who are operating in the referral-related service space include RippleHire, SpringRole, HackerRank, Grownout, Potknox and HackerEarth among others.
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