Power of Ideas 2012: Guiding your career online

Mohit Gundecha and Suruchi Wagh were graduate students at Stanford University and University of Southern California while they often wondered why there was such a lack of credible career guidance for young students in India. They soon realised that there was a huge business opportunity in helping young people make the right career move.

Also see: The Economic Times presents The Power of Ideas

The duo co-founded Yournextleap.com, a virtual career guide that apart from helping job aspirants also provides inputs to employers and recruitment consultants to find relevant resumes and the right personnel. In order to guide students to make smarter choices, the website has a pool of behavioural scientists, assessment tests and a social feature that invites users’ friends to pitch in with career advice. The company, started with an initial round of self funding by Gundecha and Wagh in July2011.

Soon thereafter they raised their first round of formal funding from Nirvana Venture Advisors. “Our goal is to match the users to find the right job so that they don’t have to go through numerous postings”, says Gundecha. Convincing the early team members to join and finding suitable engineering talent to build a technology backbone was difficult. Gundecha says in some cases he had to convince the father of an employee that Yournextleap.com was indeed a credible venture.