How is CrewScale enabling companies to hire the best tech talent? What have been your key milestones?
CrewScale is a part of the GoScale Group. The basic idea behind CrewScale is simple — creating a platform that enables both startups and large tech companies to access top percentile remote tech talent from across the world.
In a knowledge economy where technology talent is often the key determinant of success, CrewScale is creating an ecosystem that enables companies to find vetted, curated tech talent — cutting down the recruitment and training cycle dramatically. Much before the coronavirus accelerated the remote workforce journey by 3X, CrewScale had already built a community of 50000 + pre-assessed, remote engineers.
In the last couple of years, CrewScale has seen some significant milestones. We count some of the biggest names in tech as our clients — including unicorns like Grab, Swiggy, Ola, Byju’s, MPL, Vedantu — and our crew handles some of their most complex and quick-to-market projects. We’ve also been bootstrapped and profitable since Day 1 of our operations— strong believers in healthy unit economics and operating margins. In fact, earlier this year we even acquired a US-based, VC-funded remote tech hiring startup called Indiez to consolidate our growth.
Having been in remote talent hiring much before the pandemic, which is the key trend you have witnessed in the pre and post Covid world?
Today, Covid-19 has unwittingly propelled remote work into the limelight. From tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to home-grown tech companies like TCS, everyone’s paving the way for a remote-only workforce.
To put it simply, crisis has cut the remote adoption curve by 10 years, if not more. While there were a handful of remote-first companies across the world before, most companies (especially in India) preferred hiring an in-person workforce. As most tech companies have now gone completely remote, there is a strong sense that remote is the future. Companies are realising the obvious benefits of a remote workforce — low overheads; and greater flexibility and productivity. In our opinion, there is going to be a fairly big shift in work culture now — to the point where remote-first companies will become the norm rather than the exception.
How does your platform help IT talents looking for best remote work opportunities?
Despite having the right skill set, developers struggle to find the right remote opportunities— especially interesting roles globally. There are a few options — they can sign up on platforms like Upwork and Freelancer — but virtue signalling on these platforms is usually limited, and they usually end up becoming a race to the bottom. Plus, engineers are looking for stability of work as well as complexity of projects, both of which are hard to come by on these platforms.
At CrewScale, our screening process (enabled by our proprietary assessment engine called TalScale) ensures that only top-tier engineers are able to access our platform. This means that these pre-vetted engineers get to work on some of the most niche projects with the best tech companies across the world.
Platforms like Crewscale also provide a very high flexibility in terms of the range of projects and the opportunities to work with cutting edge technologies across the world. Engineers who worked for tech titans like Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft work with Crewscale for the same reason.
How are you solving the pain points of companies for sourcing the best tech talent in the market?
Shortest time-to-execution:
Candidates get onboarded in less than one day via an automated process that checks for skills and remote-readiness. Clients can find the right talent and get started on projects in less than a week — saving months wasted in recruitment and training.
Proprietary assessment platform:
CrewScale has its own proprietary talent assessment engine, TalScale, perfected by testing over 10000 engineers in the last two years. TalScale filters the top 1 per cent of applicants to build an extremely elite talent pool.
Scale of supply;
With over 50000 engineers in India (leveraging a strong IIT-BITS Pilani network), 10000+ in the Americas, and 10000+ each in Europe. CrewScale has a scale of talent and skill sets that far outstrip anything else in the market.
End-to-end platform:
CrewScale enables companies to manage the process in a comprehensive way. From creating a request for talent to shortlisting profiles based on TalScale assessment reports to timesheets to invoice management. Every aspect of the employee lifecycle can be managed through the CrewScale platform.
Which is your key tech product / platform for the job market?
CrewScale is an end-to-end tech platform for remote hiring and remote employee management. We realised that the biggest piece in the remote hiring puzzle would be building a global community of cutting-edge engineers at scale. Which is why we developed a proprietary assessment engine called Talscale, which has helped us automate screening and recruitment of engineers to a large extent. The Talscale assessment is extremely rigorous — permitting entry of only the best engineers into the talent pool.
How focused are you on tech innovation?
As mentioned above, our biggest tech innovation is our proprietary assessment engine called TalScale. Most other platforms that curate highly vetted engineering talent use a screening process that is partly automated but largely manual. With TalScale our goal is to make the assessments better and the process more efficient, enabling us to create a global community of the best remote tech talent much faster.
Is this product more suitable for only large organisations, or can a small bootstrapped startup also engage your services?
The product is open for any tech company that’s looking for remote tech talent — and doesn’t want to go through a painful, time-taking recruitment and training process. It is definitely useful for high growth startups and enterprises that are looking to develop cutting-edge products and quickly take these products to market.
What are your strategic plans for the future – new markets as well as new technologies?
GoScale Group has been a bootstrapped startup from its inception and has been extremely profitable since the beginning.
We acquired a US-based, VC-funded freelance tech talent platform called Indiez early this year. Indiez boasts of a very strong global clientele including Domino’s Pizza, and Aditya Birla Group. It also comes with an amazing talent community from 50+ countries.
The acquisition of Indiez is a step to solidify our presence and boost our reach in the remote sphere. This move multiplies our operational capabilities in the US. CrewScale now has one of the biggest communities of elite software developers across the world— with over 50000 engineers in India alone, and thousands across South East Asia, Europe, and the Americas becoming one of the largest talent communities in the eastern hemisphere.
Going forward, the goal is to accommodate remote work growth and ramp up on our capabilities to reach the same. While we have been entirely bootstrapped and profitable so far, we are now open to raising funds and going for that hockey-stick growth.
The most of the interesting and challenging work in tech development is majorly housed in the tech hotspots. Crewscale is committed to provide some of the most interesting and challenging pieces of work to our remote tech community.
We are looking to strengthen our position in the US market as well as coming up with initiatives to reach our talent better. Building a knowledge sharing community is also on our radar.
Any other significant factor?
As a company, we realise that we’re in a unique position today. Our product enables businesses to adapt much faster to a post-Covid world. We already have the tools and the resources for a remote-first future — and we’re trying to grow as quickly as we can to help businesses leverage this opportunity. Not only has Covid-19 transformed the way we work currently, but it’s also likely to shape the future of work. At CrewScale, we hope to be a big part of this transformation.
For us, remote means freedom. And it’s been incredible how we were able to provide that to so many others.
At the end of the day, knowledge workers are really looking for a way of working that will help them become their creative and productive best. And CrewScale is playing a role in facilitating that transformation.