Fountain’s Expansion Brings Light to India’s HR Space

• ByStartupStory     |    February 4, 2023

Fountain is determined to ease the challenges faced by the Indian companies in the high volume hiring space, reiterated Mr. OmPrakash Muppirala, Head of Fountain India, in an exclusive interview with Startup Story Media.

A tiny hiring team cannot effectively handle high volume hiring. Recruiters require assistance, but not just in the form of additional recruiters; they also require numerous strategies and tactics to target the appropriate talent pool and quicken the hiring process without compromising candidate quality. Fountain is expanding on its commitment to empowering recruiters by upgrading essential hiring tools that simplify and streamline volume recruitment. Continue reading to learn more about how everyone may benefit.

In an exclusive interview with Startup Story Media, OmPrakash Muppirala who is the Head of Fountain India shared the key details about high volume hiring struggles and how this startup is overcoming them.

Recruiters are the backbone of the process of hiring. The goal of every effective high volume recruitment team is to find, analyze, and hire a significant number of prospects—but not just any candidates. They must be capable and qualified to do the duties assigned to them.

Hiring managers are responsible with providing their teams with resources that not only take the manual job out of recruiters’ hands but can also be altered as personnel demands ebb and flow.

Given the seasonality of hourly jobs and the variable budgets of organisations that hire hourly labour, a one-size-fits-all hiring approach is ineffective. Recruiters who do not have agile processes in place that allow for quick and easy adjustments will fall behind on their hiring goals and may lose talent to the competition.

This is where Fountain enters the picture.

OmPrakash Muppirala, VP of Engineering and Head of Fountain India shared with Startup Story Media that Fountain has entered the Indian market with a USD 185M fundraising round, with the goal of expanding globally by allowing the company to speed employment. Fountain accomplishes this through four key pillars: automated sourcing, a great applicant experience, unique insights and analytics, and AI enabled recruiting tools.

Muppirala, who migrated to the United States for his master’s degree in 2000 from Chennai, India, and has worked in the technology field since then, is eager to bring Fountain to India. He was one of Fountain’s early employees, beginning as a Principal Engineer soon after the company raised the first series in funding.

When asked about the Fountain’s inspiration in a one-on-one interview with Startup Story Media, Fountain’s Head of India said that the Fountain was originally called Onboard IQ, which was built as a recruiting platform, and the founding team quickly realized that there were a lot of tools in this space. They discovered that no one was performing high volume hiring, so they carved out a niche for themselves. They worked with some of the early customers, when they were just startups looking to scale their businesses with high volume recruiting. This is when Fountain came in with perfecting their product market fit to build out solutions and help them develop.

The company was founded with the goal of creating a method to expedite job prospect interviews. However, with time, a larger addressable market emerged. Fountain’s customer base grew from dozens to hundreds of brands, including Just Eat Takeaway, Instacart, Sweetgreen, Stitch Fix, and Gopuff, because of the pivot.

Discussing about the launch of Fountain, Muppirala said, “We started realizing that there was tremendous interest in our product not just in restaurants, logistics, retail, manufacturing but everywhere the high volume hiring challenges exist and we started seeing a lot of interest outside of the US as well. High volume hiring is a challenge across industries and geographies so now we have customers in more than 75 different countries while we support 28 different languages across the world and roughly around half the revenue for us comes outside of the US and over the last six months to one year we were catering to multiple customers in India as well. Fountain supports 10 different languages in India, and we are seeing a huge interest in our platform. As high-volume hiring is not something people talk about a lot, we want to change the perspective. We realize that high-volume hiring is a big problem which is the reason why we are here in India especially for the blue and grey collar workforce.”

India is a thriving economy, as everyone is aware about booming digitization 5G smartphones, WhatsApp and Instagram connectivity, India has one of the world’s largest workforces with 600 million strong workforce and a vast majority of that force is essentially blue or gray colored workforce while this generation of employees or applicants have embraced the smartphone. Fountain is looking to target this generation with its AI-friendly tools for greater applicant experience.

Talking about expanding the venture, Muppirala says, “The people who we work with very closely and companies who are looking to expand their ventures are trying to reach more and more people. As we provide that broad platform and provide the service to the applicant for experiencing synchronization with the brands, Fountain’s product market fit will do very well especially in India over the next few years which will be a significant part of our growth story which makes us hopeful for the future.”

Moving forward with the interview, a key driving factor of every startup requires customer experience to which Muppirala remarked with great understanding saying that Fountain provides a customizable applicant experience and the brands that use Fountain to hire trust the process which is one of the reasons why customers can resonate with the business. Fountain takes its time to understand the uniqueness of every company and work accordingly to fulfill their requirements. At times, there are challenges, but Fountain has a practical assistant system to ease the process.

Concerning Fountain’s current investment situation, Muppirala stated that with recent funding of $185 million, Fountain aims to expand the firm overseas, with India as the primary focus.

OmPrakash Muppirala signs off saying, “We, at Fountain, want to reiterate that we have a smartphone savvy generation who have good devices with pretty good internet connection. Everyone has WhatsApp, there is no reason for us to continue doing things manually especially in the high-volume hiring space. I think understanding the audience and building a product to cater their needs is very important and that’s essentially what Fountain has been championing for a while now.”

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