Here’s How WaterBridge-Backed CBREX Is Solving Global Talent Sourcing Issues

With the emergence of LinkedIn, Monster (now foundit), Indeed and more, the B2C talent sourcing landscape has matured a lot. Yet, B2B hiring, i.e., hiring via recruitment agencies, remains uncharted territory with the lack of tech-focussed innovations. To remedy that, serial entrepreneurs Gautam Sinha, Sanjeev Punwani, Karunjay Anand and Divya Chethan launched CBREX in 2016 to build a recruitment agency marketplace.

The startup has recently marked the close of its Pre-Series A round, raising $3 Mn from WaterBridge Ventures to fund its global expansion and product development initiatives and grow its marketplace base. While this marks the startup’s first institutional fundraise, CBREX has previously raised $1.1 Mn from undisclosed HNI angel investors.

The funding within the sector comes at a time when the market, especially the tech and startup ecosystem, is going through corrective measures and businesses are laying off employees for operational reasons. While CBREX’s cofounder and CEO Sinha acknowledges the ‘patchiness’ within the HR tech ecosystem, he claims that his venture is partly insulated from the market shift. 

According to the chief executive, the startup operates in a myriad of segments besides techs, such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals and finance, making it prone to the jobs recession taking place in one sector. 

With the platform processing more than 1,000 resumes a week with a shortlist ratio of 83%, CBREX claims to have enabled hiring in 22 countries in the past six years.

With this funding, besides expanding to other countries, CBREX aims to make tech more user-friendly, introducing speech-to-text features and making its platform polyglot. 

Here’s How The Platform Works

Since talent sourcing through recruiting firms (suppliers/vendors) is not uniform at a global level, companies who want to hire (demand side) anywhere in the world have to manually set up teams in the specific region to search for a vendor. Furthermore, it is tough to find sector and geography-specific vendors, leading to a lot of time being spent on engagements, empanelments, contracting, manual shortlisting of candidates and more. In the $30 Bn worth of the global B2B talent sourcing market, CBREX simplifies all of these talent sourcing issues. 

With a user-specific dashboard and a machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithm, CBREX presents a recruitment agency marketplace. When a company posts a job, the algorithm runs through the needs of the job (geography and skills), identifies the relevant talent supplier and connects them via an in-built chatbox.

For recruitment agencies, it provides a simple candidate-resume uploading feature which helps the firms expand their search base, rationalise cost per hire and save time and effort. Once a relevant job comes up, the algorithm tells the recruitment agency to share the resume with the particular hiring company. Thus, instead of making applications massy, the algorithm only connects candidates and companies who are most likely to match.

On both dashboards, an analytics feature enables recruiters to know current market CTCs, attrition rates, fulfilment TAT and other data to enable better job fulfilment rates. CBREX also offers other services such as easing the onboarding process, requisition screening criteria and resume scoring system, which enables enterprises to receive screened resumes at scale.

To minimise the risk of onboarding a fake recruitment agency, CBREX manually runs a KYC, to verify the authenticity of the supplier. Further, a point-based grading system also allows companies to score these agencies, which in turn increases the trust factor, Sinha told Inc42.

The startup has a pay-as-you-go model, wherein enterprises (recruiters) pay an undisclosed percentage of CTC to CBREX, a portion of which is transferred to the recruitment agency. 

“Hiring productivity for recruiters has gone up by 400%, while agencies have seen a 2X revenue jump,” Sinha said.

Currency, CBREX counts nearly 40 enterprises as its customers at any given time, and over 3,500 talent-sourcing firms use the platform for accessing 2,500+ open recruitment requirements.

What’s Next For CBREX

CBREX cofounder Sinha, in a conversation with Inc42, stated that the Bengaluru-based startup is seeing some traction from retail recruiters and agencies for jobs in fashion and art. 

Besides, the startup which competes with the likes of Recruiter.com, BountyJobs, Visage and more, is looking for tech upgrades in the AI-based talent screening and interviewing space. 

“Assessment is adjacent to what we are doing in the sourcing. We are looking to expand and build tools, or integrate with tools, to help make assessment more robust,” he added. “Another huge focus is on analytics for both recruiters and suppliers, making the process more streamlined.”

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