"We want to hire a very specific kind of person"

Putting a name to it

In 2019-20, Amrut was leading marketing for HyperVerge, and Amrit was a consultant. Together, they interviewed every founder and early employee to understand HyperVerge's raison d'etre better. It was clear that what they were describing was a different kind of company - one with two goals - profit and contribution. Sort of like Zoho. We found that this was an emerging global trend - one that Harvard Business Review had already written about - The dual purpose company.

Explaining to candidates

Looking at the pool of talent that HyperVerge used to attract, it was clear that a lot of candidates were "in it to win it" for their careers. They wanted tough challenges, fast growth, and money. Very few had the patience to understand HyperVerge's dual purpose. To solve for this, HyperVerge had devised a hiring process that included a 4-6hr in-person founder meeting to make sure that talent understands that "contribution" is not just lip service. We had to improve this process.

To be honest, once we had articulated the problem well, it was fairly easy to solve with video: We shot multiple interviews and HyperVerge internal events and created a long video. This "contribution" video is used by HyperVerge in its hiring process.

Talent brand

While the internal "contribution" video solved one problem, it didn't solve for all problems. We still needed a public talent brand to attract high quality talent. For this, we followed a unique approach. We made video stories about HyperVerge's toughest challenges - solving for Reliance Jio, and solving for fraud in Vietnam. These were the stories:

To round it off as a complete package, we also made a video about HyperVerge's origin story:

Looking back

HyperVerge's talent branding pushed us into new areas we had never seen before. In our world-view, talent acquisition is a B2C sales and marketing job - the TA team has to convince a bunch of folk that they need to buy into the company's core idea (vision, mission, etc) and offering (role, growth opportunities, pay, benefits, etc). In most cases, we speak about the latter - because they are the functional benefits. But at HyperVerge, this wasn't enough. We had to go deep.

We're grateful for the opportunity, and thankful that our work was useful. We made these videos before the pandemic. As the COVID crisis raged, HyperVerge grew in strength - doubling in just 2 years.