How this company manages to hire niche prop tech talent

Facilio is a young startup, which provides an AI-driven property operations platform that helps real-estate owners and operators to harness the power of building data, optimise performance and control portfolio operations. Ezhilarasi Venugopal, who leads the HR function for Facilio’s close to 155 employees, shares that the Company works in a very niche market giving Saas-based enterprise platform solutions for data-driven real-time facility operations and maintenance.

When it comes to other functions in the organisation — such as marketing talent, software developers, mobile application developers, Java developers, or the UI and UX designers — the Company manages to attract talent from other Saas-based companies in India. However, the energy and analytics team at Facilio comprises core property tech talent, which is rare to find and usually takes time to hire.

“Generally, when we look to hire somebody in our energy and analytics team, we have to hire talent that comes with a background of working experience in a property tech platform; talent that can add value to our product side as well,” states Ezhilarasi.

Facilio’s energy and analytics team is an extension of the project implementation team. This team consists of the core tech talent of the Company, which handles 90 per cent of the customer demos and live projects. Their primary skills lie in the areas of energy metering and lending sustainability support to various projects in the Company.

“Generally, when we look to hire somebody in our energy and analytics team, we have to hire talent that comes with a background of working experience in a property tech platform; talent that can add value to our product side as well”

Ezhilarasi Venugopal, head HR, Facilio

 

Since this job requires in-depth knowledge of the property tech ecosystem, prior experience of working with a property tech company is essential. The ideal talent should also have some experience working in a product-based company to be a perfect fit for the role.

Ezhilarasi agrees that hiring this core and niche tech talent is a challenge for Facilio as the Company has a very limited pool of talent in this area. It takes more than 30 to 40 days to hire a person for this team.

However, now, the Company seems to be open to hiring even freshers for the energy and analytics teams. As per Ezhilarasi, there some requirements for freshers in the energy and analytics team at Facilio. The new hires will initially start as interns in the Company, learning on-the-job and completing their education under the able guidance and mentorship of Facilio’s team of mentors and trainers.

Since talent in this area is quite rare, as a practice, Ezhilarasi personally keeps a record of all people in the past who failed to make the cut for the final job but showed potential.

“Whenever there is a requirement, I go back to the old profiles and check if they are ready and available to take up the role,” admits Ezhilarasi.

For other tech and business-enablement roles, Facilio prefers to hire from SaaS- based companies as they have similar operations.

All new hires, irrespective of their background, are mandatorily put through a two to three-session orientation where they are given product training.

The Company prefers candidates with a high level of learning agility and capable of starting as quickly as possible. As Ezhilarasi shares, “We look for highly agile learners with a strong desire to work in a startup culture and capable of unlocking new possibilities”.

The Company follows a mix of lateral and campus hiring. In fact, recently, the firm has relied more on campus hires, with over 50 of the recent hires being picked from campuses and 30 being lateral hires.

Ezhilarasi also shares that Facilio encourages referrals too, with 33 per cent of hires coming from employee referrals. All employees, including interns, can refer suitable candidates.