Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based company that assesses students' employability, surveyed 55,000 of them last year and found that not even 3% were ready to be taken on by IT firms without extra training.
Aspiring Minds earns enough of a return to allow it to reinvest in the business, and to attract outside investors, so that it can scale quickly.
In parallel, Aspiring Minds has created a modular, computer-based assessment instrument, the Aspiring Minds Computer Adaptive Test, which more than a million graduates of 2,000 different colleges in India have taken.
Similarly, Aspiring Minds (of which I am a cofounder), an Indian talent-assessment service aimed at democratizing the market for talent, focuses on various out-of-the-mainstream job seekers in different markets.
But if the brothers exemplify the engineering gap, the firm they started together in 2007, Aspiring Minds, is busy debunking it.According to the company, only 4.2% of India's engineers are fit to work in a software product firm, and just 17.8% are employable by an IT services company, even with up to six months' training.
Importantly, Aspiring Minds acts as a social multiplier by targeting everyone from twenty-somethings upwards, who would otherwise become disenfranchised and alienated.
That was the seed for Aspiring Minds, founded by two students I had the good fortune to meet, an engineer from MIT and one from IIT.
Aspiring Minds tested people already employed by such companies, looking for correlations between the test results of past recruits and their success on the job, as judged by managers.The company is not the first to bring standardised testing to India.
Varun Aggarwal is the cofounder of Aspiring Minds, a company that uses artificial intelligence to match talent with jobs.
But Aspiring Minds keeps costs down by running its test in the computer labs of the colleges themselves, rather than on dedicated infrastructure.
Around a third of Indian graduates will remain unemployed, despite employers bemoaning a lack of skilled recruits.Varun Aggarwal of Aspiring Minds, a company that surveys student capabilities, estimates that if university exams were run properly, 70% of students would fail.
