Anybody who has appeared for a job interview knows how stressful it is. In metro cities, corporate houses hire talents straight off-campus. However, there is a lack of such opportunities for people in Tier 2 and 3 cities and smaller towns. There is no dearth of talent in these places, but employers often do not have the resources or the bandwidth to hire from a diverse talent pool.
Fundamento, previously known as Skillr and an extension of Leap Skills, commenced in 2013 with the vision to hire talent from smaller towns in India. Seeing the need to act as the bridge between the talent pool and employers, they reverse-engineered the training programs by talking to employers who tapped into hiring from such a diverse pool and addressing the hiring concerns.
One of the largest gaps they identified was behavioural skills. There is a lack of individuals with the right attitude towards work and being employed, the right mindset with a desire to continue learning and improve. Technical skills are more readily available than people with the wrong attitude for hire. Hiring people with the right skills is critical because employers need unnecessary time and effort. Therefore, they developed a behavioural skills program targeted at their market.
One of the other realisations was how nobody was testing talents for behavioural skills and emotional intelligence in the standard hiring process. These two are the most important skills in the standard hiring processes employers look for in a candidate. With this market understanding, they started Skillr, now known as Fundamento, on October 8th, 2020.
This Is Why Employers And Those Seeking Employment Should Partner With Fundamento
Fundamento recognised that organisations seek to build granularly skilled, resilient teams vs singularly competent ones. Investing in talent to build better, more productive organisations are commonplace now. With the swiftly changing work scenario, organisations realise the need to build a strong workforce thriving in a rapidly evolving work environment.
It’s a technical world, and there will always be a need for technical people. However, studies show that the largest gap in the workplace is behavioural skills. Technical skills, although evolving continuously, are measurable and relatively straightforward. Behavioural skills are complex and require deeper understanding. Moreover, these skills are transferable and cross-functional. Human skills such as critical thinking, bias to action, learning agility, and even effective communication bolters people to have accelerated careers and not just a job.
Ankit Durga, Co-founder, of Fundamento shares, “There is a gap currently when it comes to building these fundamental skills in a structured way amongst individuals. We are building an upskilling platform that spans the entire journey of a professional from a fresher to a leader, helping them grow and develop their career in the best way possible. We are essentially building a whole ecosystem for personal development.”
AI and the future of work will impact jobs in the market. Many jobs would cease to exist or be automated. The difference between an outstanding leader and a good leader is their professionalism, as one cannot automate behavioural skills.
Fundamento is unique in its approach as they have spent more than a decade decoding and imparting critical behavioural skills to more than 200K young professionals. They understand that addressing the skills gap alone is insufficient; organisations need to train individuals to build future-ready behavioural skills. They are, therefore, focused on working with both individuals and organisations to develop these skills at the workplace.
Curious To Know More About Fundamento?
Fundamento is a company committed to helping you measure and develop critical future-ready behavioural skills for unparalleled success. Fundamentos’ Flagship product is the Upskilling Management Platform powered by a proprietary organisational framework called Skill Flex that leverages deep research on future-ready skills and ethical AI.
Also read: How This Startup Is Increasingly Becoming Popular For Affordable Health Plan – Kenko
The product highlights include:
- Actionable and objective data on behavioural skills
- Customisable and personalised learning plans
- Real-time insights that accelerate your career growth
Fundamento gives organisations and individuals accurate and actionable data on behavioural skills to measure and develop future-ready teams. Skills like critical thinking, empathy, resilience, and bias to action are precious in the digital era as they’re highly transferable, learnable, help navigate changing work dynamics and predict job potential.
In a future where skills are the currency for organisations and individuals, objective data on behavioural skills will be critical for building enduring teams.
Fundamento helps you:
- Uncover potential through interactive quizzes
- Measure your strengths
- Conduct training needs analysis
- Learn in the flow of work
- Measure impact
Product USPs:
- Measure what matters: get objective and actionable data on behavioural skills that predict job performance
- Know where you stand: understand skill gaps so you can plan your development journey with precision
- Learn from the best: get access to customisable, personalised skills-based learning plans that amplify your growth
- Show your potential: map your progress accurately and see visible results that you can share with real-time data
Tackling The Market And Its Challenges
Fundamento helps employers find high-quality talent with speed and precision. Behavioural skills training sees a spike in demand. The company is focused on building human skills in teams and individuals so that organisations can build high-performance, work-ready teams.
Operating in a new space of business comes with challenges, you have to build consensus as you build the business, and it is time-consuming and costly.
The market is fast evolving, and the COVID 19 pandemic has changed space landscape. Fundamento has quickly learned from an employer-centric company that it is now a candidate market. There is a lot of uncertainty and bubbles regarding where talent is headed. But Fundamento is ready to tackle these challenges as they move ahead. They rely heavily on feedback from the organisations and people they partner to address concerns as they continue to discover their business space.
Fundamento has tested over 20,000 people and helped them get a step closer to finding jobs. They’ve worked with 50+ employers and helped them service their requirements concerning their sales and customer experience teams. Rigorous when it comes to technically evaluating their tool, they’ve partnered with UPenn, Stanford University, and MIT A-Labs.
The brand is targeting to penetrate the Indian and US market with its product. The business functions purely on a subscription-based model and they consider companies such as Mettl, Thomas, and Test Gorrila as their primary competitors. They will continue to work with different organisations and individuals. Some of their clients include Zomato, Flipkart, American Express, Ultrahuman, Shyft, and Leap.com.
Backed by angel investors such as Binny Bansal (Co-founder, Flipkart), Caesar Sengupta (Co-founder, Arbo Works, and former VP, Next Billion Users, Google), and Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), among others, they’ve raised $1.4 million in their pre-seed round.
Meet The Core Founding Team
Megha Agarwal – Co-founder
Ankit Durga – CEO & Co-founder
Riddhi Chhajer – Product Owner
Iknoor Kaur – VP – Branding & Communications
Eshani Jain – Entrepreneur-in-Residence (Business Strategy)
Khushil Khatri – Engineering Manager
Kanchan Varlani – People Operations Manager
