We exist because of our franchisees: Aroon Balakrishnan

Waays & Solutions is leveraging its franchising model while expanding pan India. The company is operating through 60 offices across the country and has 150 plus recruitment specialists on board. Talking about the business model, franchising, and future plans venturing into overseas market and contractual staffing, Aroon Balakrishnan, Founder, Waays & Solutions spoke to Franchiseindia.com.

How do you help companies meet their manpower requirements?
Companies outsource their manpower requirements to us keeping in mind, past performance, quality and speed of execution (TAT) and a bandwidth of recruiting pan India, which are our basic traits of fulfilling requirements for our companies with a pool of candidates in our database as well as sourcing them from available data sources. We complete the requisite requirements of our clients within the timeframe.

What kind of customised recruitment solutions do you offer?
We take our time sharpening the axe i.e. understanding the requirement of our client to the extent possible; download the same to the market research team and the recruitment team, which starts sourcing apt candidates for the said profile. We share our inputs to the HR basis the feedback received from candidates and market research team and make necessary tweaks either side to ensure timely closure of the position.

What is unique with your manpower recruitment mechanism that helps companies to get the right talent?
Recruitment is no rocket science. There are companies that need people and there are people who need jobs, WE MATCH MAKE. The difference between a good recruiter and a not so good recruiter is much more ambitious and doesn’t give up. What’s unique about us is that we are hungry for more, we don’t give up on a profile and most importantly we enjoy what we do.

Overall how many companies and recruitment specialists you have on board?
It’s not about how many companies we have, but it’s about how many active companies and volumes requirements we have. Today, we have more than 7000 requirements across all the clients that we are working on, with a team of 150 plus recruitment specialists across India. Even if we scale upto 500 plus recruitment specialists working 24x7, our requirements would still be there. It’s a good problem we have and we are willing to live with this problem. Hence, we are in a large scale expansion mode, opening new offices across the length and breadth of India to cater to requirements of our clients as well as promote the opportunity to entrepreneurs pan India who would like to start a business in the HR field. We don’t limit ourselves to a particular sector.

What is your current market presence and how has franchising helped you widen your footprints in the market?
We are currently with 60 offices across the nations geography with our corporate office based out of Mumbai. Franchising has helped us cater and penetrate to companies and candidates present in tier II and tier III cities apart from metro cities.

What kind of support do you offer to the franchisees?
We have a plug n play model. Out of our 60 offices only three have prior HR experience and the rest of the franchise owners hail from varied backgrounds including IT, engineering, telecom, construction, housewives and education etc. We assist our franchise owners to set up their business, right from hiring of recruitment consultants to training them to sharing exclusive requirements to assisting them to close profiles. The franchisee is not an external business unit, but an integral part of the Waays family.

We have a simple mantra that the franchisees don’t exist because of us, but we exist because of the franchisees. We share 80 percent of the revenue with our franchisees. We can only make money when our franchisees make money.

What are your future expansion plans through franchising and what will be the investment?
We are looking at what more can be offered to the franchisee. We are looking forward to venture into the overseas market as well as contractual staffing, thus giving more opportunities and avenues to our franchisee partners to earn more money.

How do you see the competition and challenges in the market?
I don’t know what competition is, I would rather use precious time focusing on my business than wasting energies in finding out what others are up to.

According to you how big is the manpower recruitment industry in India?
As long as fresh graduates keep passing out every year there will be jobs waiting for them and we help them find those jobs. We have just started scratching the surface with our finger nails. Opportunities are immense waiting to be capitalized on.