mumbai earlystage venture capital is starting to pour into specialized online recruitment startups at a time when employers are looking to go beyond the plainvanilla job posting portals that currently dominate the indian hiring market vcs are increasingly seeding these nextgeneration techbacked startups that claim to have differentiated offerings compared to the existing players most of which had sprung up in the late 1990s during the first wave of indian internet startups to catch them early usbased venture fund matrix partners india is investing in a 10monthold gurgaon startup grownout which enables companies to leverage their employees professional network and automate referral hiring other recent earlystage deals include helion venture partners investment in talentauctioncom an auctionbased marketplace for jobs nexus venture partners financing of zlemma and mynoticeperiodcom which raised its first round of funds led by idg ventures we are building the nextgeneration referral hiring platform to make recruiting more efficient and costeffective despite incredible innovations in technology in the last decade recruiting still remains a fundamental challenge in the industry we believe there is a disruptive market opportunity which can change old methods and make hiring a painless process said sumit gupta cofounder ceo of grownout which had been seedfunded by outbox ventures indias search and recruitment market is pegged at 800 million largely served by staffing agencies job boards and company hr departments naukri is the countrys largest online job board it began operations in 1997 we believe there are several opportunities to solve the hiring needs of indian small and medium businesses and we intend to make multiple investments in this space referral hiring the holy grail of recruitment results in shorter hiring cycles lower hiring costs and higher employee retention said tarun davda director matrix india the hiring market has undergone a tectonic change with professional networking sites like linkedin gaining traction and many companies using these platforms for recruitment startups like zlemma use linkedin besides other job seeker sites to shortlist candidates for their clients posts our investment in math and data science is what makes our product highly effective for recruiters and hiring managers the key distinguishing factor for us is the scoring of candidates associating a precise number against a candidate for a specific job gives recruiters great ability to separate the wheat from the chaff said ashwin rao cofounder of zlemma the pune and palo altobased startup raised 35 million a year ago led by nexus venture partners