Ep. 175- SAP's Swetha PB on Fixing the Hiring Process

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Swetha PB, Head of Product at Brilliant Hire, an SAP startup. They discuss hiring screening, SAP support, innovation talent, and building a startup within a large company.

Interview Transcript   (Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Insideoutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services, that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking pools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and we have another amazing guest. Live today from the Fall Experiment conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with us today is Swetha PB from Brilliant hire. Welcome to the show.

Swetha PB: Hi everyone.

Brian Ardinger: Swetha thanks for coming out. You are with a company called Brilliant Hire, Head of Product, and Brilliant Hire is a startup, but it's an interesting startup because it's spun out of SAP, which is a large corporation.  So we want to talk a little bit about that particular process, but before we dig into that, let's talk a little bit about how you got involved in innovation in the first  place.

Swetha PB: Yeah, definitely. So since college days innovation or problem solving and trying to figure out creative ways of doing things with something that interested me a lot and being part of SAP, there are a lot of opportunities being hackathons or a lot of different ways that we could explore that part of us.  And I think that was what brought us together even to start this brilliant hire and what it is today.

Brian Ardinger: Tell the audience a little bit about what Brilliant Hire is all about. 

Swetha PB: Brilliant Hire is a screening as a service. We provide a SaaS based software that helps reduce the time and effort involved in the hiring process in an unbiased manner. We all know that hiring is broken and we hear to solve the first part of it by, you know, what do using your time, effort involved in that.

Brian Ardinger: How did it come about that you wanted to try to solve this particular problem and how did SAP become involved in this? 

Swetha PB: So that's a very interesting part of our journey. It came out of what is called today in actual terminology, as user innovation. So I and my colleagues, the two other co founders of Brilliant Hire, would ask to take part in interviews. We were asked to scale a team from four to 40 all in a month. So that was a challenge for us. So we had to go on weekends. This is all back in India. Go on weekends, take interviews for these roles. And what made us realize, though we were spending so much time interviewing candidates, only 30% were going into the next round of interviews. There's a 70% rejection rate right there. So this kind of shocked us. We started one like, you know, explore, is this a problem just with us, just within our company or is it present over the, you know, all industries. That's what we tried to solve and we started on, we started to explore, we started talking to lot more recruiters. We did a lot of research and understood, yeah, this is a problem all around and hiring is clearly broken. And that got us excited and we're like, okay, let's see how we solve the problem. And inside SAP, there are a lot of hackathons that keep happening. And good for us that one of the hackathons hired smart HR as the topics. So it was a great time for us to like, the problem that we faced, how do we solve it? 

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io