News: Belong extends their AI-based hiring platform for sales and marketing

HR Technology

Belong extends their AI-based hiring platform for sales and marketing

Belong has now expanded its AI-based hiring solution to include sales and marketing hiring.
Belong extends their AI-based hiring platform for sales and marketing

The Bengaluru-based recruitment startup, Belong expands its recruiting solution to assist companies in hiring right professionals for sales and marketing roles across various industries. 

In an e-mail conversation with Vijay Sharma, CEO of Belong, he explains Belong's ranking algorithm blends contextual insights on both candidates and companies to create strong indicators of relevant, high-quality talent, instead of simplistic matching of skills listed in resumes with requirements stated in job descriptions. 

Further, Vinodh Kumar Ravindranath, CTO of Belong adds, “Belong’s search algorithm is fundamentally different from other candidate search solutions since it is based on understanding people’s career paths than just keywords in resumes. The machine learning algorithm has also been trained to understand intricacies specific to sales and marketing hiring. For example, in many organizations, the breadth of a marketing leader's experience is as important a factor as having expertise in specific skills.”

Belong is an Outbound recruitment solution provider that helps business targets, passive candidates. The earlier product of Belong includes Belong Expert and Belong Hire. In March, raised 67 crores ($10 million) in its series B round funding. The funding was majorly led by Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm. 

Vijay shares, till date, Belong Hire – outbound hiring SAAS platform has been used by more than 100 customers to help them hire quality talent across technology functions in the form of software engineering, big data, analytics, product management and design. With sales and marketing, they are enabling hiring across enterprise sales, digital marketing, consumer sales, inside sales, inbound marketing specialists, corporate marketing, account-based marketing, marketing strategy, marketing automation, content and similar roles across the industry. 

On being asked the challenges, they look forward to solving in sales and marketing hiring, Vijay shares, 

Traditionally, hiring for entry level or field sales roles was a straightforward numbers game. Candidates were sourced primarily through inbound applications, career pages, job boards, advertisements, campus placements, etc. However, when companies use these mass recruitment methods to reach the maximum number of candidates, they lose control of the quality and relevance of talent. Which means that company resources regarding time, cost, and recruiter effort are unnecessarily wasted.

He further adds, “On the other hand, when hiring for strategic or leadership roles, candidates are sourced primarily through keyword searches, referrals, specialized agencies, and of course - hiring from similar companies, often direct competitors. This narrows down the potential talent pool significantly, especially when the job description also has qualifiers such as preferred universities or strict constraints on industry experience. “

Ganesh Lakshminarayanan, COO of Capillary Technologies and Belong’s client shares “What we need today is to be able to understand not only a candidate’s experience but their future potential as well. Especially in revenue-critical roles like Sales, it’s important to find candidates that have proven records of adaptability and growth, and that’s not always available in their resumes. ” 

On being asked about his thoughts on assessing the softer aspects of the candidates through this AI-based algorithm, Vijay states, “Artificial intelligence today acts as an enabler to drive efficiency in recruiting. Essentially, what this means is it empowers recruiters with the ability to precision target and go after quality talent that’s truly best in class, focus on delivering five-star candidate experience and hiring manager experience and reduce recruiting bias by leveraging the world’s biggest currency today -data.”

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Topics: HR Technology, Talent Acquisition

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