Talent Measurement company solution provider, Mettl is in discussion with at least half half-a-dozen Chinese companies as part of its efforts to expand overseas operations. 

Founded in 2009 by Tonmoy Shingal and Ketan Kapoor in 2009, Mettl offers line assessment platform that enables companies to measure and track skills of pre-hires and employees. Mettl is a Saas-based assessment platform with over 1500 clients in over 80 countries.

Recently, Mettl partnered with Global Information Solutions Technology (GIST), in an attempt to digitize the education industry. With the help of GIST, Mettl is aiming to reach out to hundreds of leading academic institutions across the country to provide its customized online assessment solutions.

This year in June, Mettl partnered with Talent Lab to influence the Mexican market.  It was also published in media that since the beginning of their partnership with Talent Lab, they have onboarded over 30 new major clients including companies like Aeromexico, Kellogg’s, Walmart and Engenium.

Tonmoy Singhal, Chief Operating Officer at Mettl shared in media, "China would be the first country outside India where we are looking at forging partnerships. A lot of our customers have bases in China and we were triggered by the demand for products and solutions (like ours) to look at a stronger presence there.” 

As reported in media, the company is targeting revenue of $10 million in the current fiscal, up from $6 million that it reported for the previous financial year. Mettl was also in the news recently as it was awarded the India Emerging Twenty Award hosted by London & Partners. India Emerging Twenty (IE20) provides a global platform to the top 20 upcoming global Indian organizations,

Ketan Kapoor, CEO & Co-founder, Mettl in an interview with People Matters shares the company's expansion plan and challenges faced on this journey.

Q. What is Mettl's global expansion plan? What challenges do you foresee in expanding talent assessment services in different regions?

Mettl is expanding through strategic partnerships in relevant and booming international markets, giving enterprise businesses access to Mettl's expansive suite of predictive applications, talent assessment, and management. Mettl’s applications impact every stage of the employee life-cycle to bring targeted, data-driven insights to your existing as well as tentative workforce across an assortment of job roles. 

We customise our platform to incorporate the cultural and linguistic nuances of various geographies to offer our clients the highest a grade of technology-driven, market-centric solutions and is also in talks with potential partners and has key partner on board to strengthen its presence in international markets.

Analogous to our tagline we are now helping international as well as native clients help build winning teams. In the process, we have had a few challenges which we have sailed through like,  

1. Language and communication barrier.

2. Conforming to international demands and market fit. 

3. Ensuring suitable resources and manpower. 

4. Work culture and business ethics adoption.

We have been expanding in global geographies like USA, Mexico, Germany, Philipines, Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, Japan, UAE since the last year. 

Q. How do you plan to expand your reach in China?

Mettl’s decision to venture into the Chinese market is triggered by the growing demand for advanced skill assessment and recruitment solutions from corporations and educational institutions in the country. As a part of its growth plan for the Chinese market, it now aims to serve over 200 clients and carry out over five million assessments in the next two years. The company will continue working with its existing customers such as Capgemini, Wipro, NIIT, Microsoft, etc., in China, while exploring associations with corporations, HR consultants, as well as colleges and training companies there. Although the language and cultural barrier for an outsider company entering China are considerable, the massive growth opportunity in the market propelled us to venture there. Our experience and learnings from other overseas markets and environments also provided us with a great deal of insight for this expansion.

Q. How is Mettl different from other talent assessment platforms? What are some unique features of your assessment platform?

We will start off with the three strongest pillars of Mettl, and then on we can explain them better in the following paragraphs.

• Ability to create tests
• What – Cognitive / Personal / Behavioural / Domain
• How – Simulators and interactive questions types
• Strong technology platform with proctoring
• Solves for speed, scale, reach, authenticity
• Never loses data with the help of robust technological platform
• Works in extremely low bandwidth situations
• Analytics and insights
• Candidate / Group / Item / Skill level
• Benchmarking around competencies for a particular job role/industry.

Our SaaS-based talent measurement platform offers recruitment and skill assessments solutions to help companies hire the right people for every role and level. Its predictive talent measurement approach focuses on research-backed assessments, efficient delivery on an innovative cloud platform, and in-depth analytics & data science. Following several stages of R&D, we have developed five proprietary tools which back 200+ ready-to-use assessments and question banks for 800+ skills across industries and job roles. The testing platform offers globally integrated local solutions for efficient test delivery over the internet and even helps conduct offline assessments in remote locations with no internet access, through smart devices.

The platform also boasts of strong in-house content creation capabilities which customise and delivers assessments based on the client’s unique requirements by understanding in detail, the technical and behavioral competencies which distinguish performance standards for each company. Through a statistical validation of various performance metrics for each role, the platform devises assessments to measure competencies of future incumbents against employees who have already been assessed. It enables organizations to create customised assessments for use across the entire employee lifecycle – from pre-hiring screening and skill assessment of candidates to creating training and development programs for employees. 

Q. What are your thoughts on assessment industry? What are some trends and challenges that you observe in talent assessment landscape?

• Generalized Application and Work Profiles:

A lot of our clients are looking for an end-to-end solution which caters to the entire employee life-cycle in their organization, thus this is a strong trend which we are watching over for quite a while. 

• Analytic | Benchmark driven competencies and mapping:

There is this whirlwind of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) prevalent across industries; they are changing what they focus on when they make hiring and pipeline decisions. Whether someone can do the job at hand is still important, but businesses increasingly also want to know what else the person can do. Some businesses are thus taking future potential more into account when making selection decisions, while others are assessing candidates’ ability to be adaptable. 

• Watching Time-to-Hire:

If there is one thing previous downturns and times of uncertainty have taught us is that time-to-hire tends to increase. The pool of people to choose from becomes bigger, and firms tend to become more risk-averse. 

• Rise of Virtual Assessment and Predictive Model Based Hiring:

Virtual assessment – with interviews and testing completed remotely – has repeatedly featured on lists of top trends in recent years. It is popular because it saves on travel costs and so is cheaper, as well as being scalable. They are scalable, authenticated and robust to be sued across sectors. 

• Talent Analysis and Predictive Intelligence:

Predictive data analysis and benchmarking are bringing about an expansive change in how assessments are being done. There are a lot of monumental shifts occurring in how firms procure and implement assessment data, more so than before. They increasingly expect the assessment not just to help them make good selection decisions, but also provide talent intelligence: Information that can be used to inform broader talent processes. To better target attraction, on-boarding, and development.