Startup Circle: How is Hyreo helping IT companies in HR functions using deep-tech?

Human Resource functions have evolved significantly in the current time. They are now mostly influenced by the type of corporation, policies, economics and culture. But technology is primarily driving the massive change and startups are very much at the forefront. With tech at the front, organizations can attract, engage, develop, and retain talent with the data-driven insights. This is what Hyreo does.

The deep-tech driven platform offers Human Capital Management Services. With support from Oracle India, the startup has achieved new heights. Read Arun Satyan, Co-founder and CEO, Hyreo, talk about the startup extensively.

Tell us more about Hyreo and your offerings.

Hyreo is a candidate relationship management (CRM) tool with deep conversational AI capabilities enabling a candidate-centric recruiting model. Our platform leverages conversational AI, data science and human behaviour science principles to create a 24/7 virtual layer of assistance for candidates. It also answers their questions, takes feedback and assists them at each step of recruiting. The backend CRM tool brings together the tools to automate recurring recruiter tasks like scheduling, assessments, virtual hiring and on-boarding. Hyreo integrates with large HCM solutions like Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). The benefits we bring to the table include enhanced employer brand, consistent candidate experience. We also offer improved offer conversion, lower cost and higher quality of hires.

What are the drivers/market trends that are shaping the HR landscape in 2021?

In H1 CY 2020, we mostly saw organizations focused very much on improving their business resilience utilizing technology. However, from H2 onwards, we’ve seen a consistent increase in focus on digital transformation and technology adoption across all areas in HR. Organizations anticipate different HR functions - like recruiting, training and on-boarding - continuing to be mostly virtual for the next 8-10 quarters. Enterprises and mid-segment companies across industries are looking to adopt hi-tech solutions for improved performance against KPIs. Also, a point to note is that HR service providers are looking to acquire digital tools to help them better serve their clients.

We expect enterprise buyers to continue evaluating HR products and services in 2021 - based on ROI, solution completeness and ability to scale globally.

How is Hyreo tapping these market trends for growth?

A key area of focus for us in 2021 is to deepen partnerships with HCM product companies like Oracle and also HCM consulting companies globally. Our customer outreach programs are designed to showcase how we can help solve real industry challenges at scale and co-exist with our customers’ existing IT investments. We’ll continue to focus on educating customers about our compelling value proposition and ROI based approach.

Tell us more about Hyreo’s innovation strategy.

Hyreo is a deep tech solution addressing a specific functional area, which is recruiting for technology and engineering companies. Our approach to innovation is getting features developed and also deployed in quick time. We have also kept the pace of the industry in mind. Hyreo runs multiple short test sprints with end-users to understand and benchmark user preferences and deploy these changes in a very short amount of time. Our strategy is to work on improving the depth of our solution. For example, improving the decision making capability of our platform, increase configurability at the user level and ability to support global use cases with multi-language capabilities.

How has Oracle helped you in your journey?

From a market connect and technology architecture perspective, Oracle has been extremely critical to our growth in the last 12 months. The Oracle for Startups ecosystem provides invaluable support to startups and is probably one of the best programs available globally. Oracle has offered us cloud credits and excellent cloud migration support. Most importantly, it offered us opportunities to showcase our solution to multiple global customers of Oracle. As a B2B startup targeting enterprise customers, having a partnership with Oracle and joint 'Go-To-Market' delivers excellent results in quick time. For example, in a recent pursuit with a large banking customer, the Oracle team supported us by evangelizing our solution. Thus, it gave the customer the confidence to move fast and close the deal.

From a business success perspective, for any conversational AI application to be successful, a robust, high performant digital infrastructure foundation is the key. We have transitioned most of our cloud instances to Oracle’s secure, second-generation cloud infrastructure. By using OCI, we’ve improved our application’s performance by over 2X, reduced our operational costs by over 30% and fine-tuned our product, while adding more new customers to our fold. We look forward to continuing our great partnership with Oracle in future as well.

What are your growth priorities for 2021?

We’re witnessing increased demand for our offering. In fact, we’ve seen over 40% increase in customer pilot projects just in the last 3 months. Going forward, we’re looking to deepen our relationship with existing customers and expand our customer base. We plan to go global. We’ll continue to enter into global partnerships and roll out contextual services for organizations. Thus, helping us better deal with the new normal. In parallel, we’ll try to further improve our technology capabilities.