Interviews

Employees Background Check: TraqCheck makes it quick with an AI based Staff Verification product

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Jaibir Nihal Singh, Co-founder, TraqCheck

 

  • Give us an overview of TraqCheck and its journey so far?

TraqCheck is India’s first AI based background verification product, which can authenticate & aggregate a person’s criminal record, education history, previous employment, Identity, address & psychometric results with meticulous accuracy and fast turnaround time. We accomplish this by automating the verification process through cutting-edge technology and machine learning systems to understand huge volumes of data. TraqCheck’s technology increases speed, enhances efficiency, reduces human error and helps companies maintain compliance. We launched in April of 2021 and already are working with 150 large corporates in India.

  • What was the insight behind the inception and launch of TraqCheck?

TraqCheck was founded by 3 friends: Armaan Mehta, Jaibir Nihal Singh and Rishabh Jain. We were all studying in Los Angeles and saw that the background verification industry in America was very technologically advanced compared to India where it is still a very manual and offline industry. At a time when every industry was going digital and was incorporating technology into it, the background check industry had little to no innovation.

There were many challenges to set up and scale up. Firstly, we were just 22 years old and had no credibility and experience in building a company. We started from my (Jaibir’s) grandmothers living room and for the first 18 months we did not move into our own office. It took us about a year to develop the technology and create the product which was very difficult as the data in India is very unstructured and not easily available. Another big challenge was that this was in March 2020 and the pandemic had just begun.

Once the product was ready, we had great difficulty in selling our product as we are in the B2B space, and all our potential clients were large corporates. Getting meetings with corporates was very hard and a lot of them would not take us seriously as we were just 22 years of age.  However, the reason we started getting a lot of traction is because our product was very good, and we were able to sell background checks much cheaper and with a quicker turnaround time than our clients.

Our first big client was a very big financial company – Bajaj Capital and it took us nearly 8 months to close that contract. We ran a pilot with them where we background checked their entire workforce (4000-5000 employees) and found a high discrepancy rate on precleared employees. This impressed them and resulted us in getting their entire background verification contract. This was a big win for us and since then we have never looked back. We have also never raised external funding and are completely bootstrapped and have grown the business with our profits.

  • What are your plans for expansion and growth? Top priorities for 2023?

Expansion plans for 2023 is to work on completely automating the product and to 5x our revenue this year while maintaining high profitability. Background verification is currently a service sector, and we want to change that and be the first completely tech enabled background verification product. We are 80% there as of today and plan to completely automate this within the year. We will be leveraging artificial intelligence and large language models to achieve the same. The past few months have been exciting for AI as there have been so many new developments and now companies are only limited by their imagination. We are currently working day and night and are utilising the power of technologies such as chat GPT and generative AI to improve our product.

  • What types of background verification are most appropriate for the Indian market?

Initially companies would only background check their top executives but today companies like to background check every single employ that they onboard. A bad hire can cost companies much more than an employee’s CTC and it is of prime importance that every employee is verified. Initially companies would focus on verifying white collar employees but as the gig economy is growing rapidly, companies are also making background verifications a must for blue collar employees. A lot of the employees of a gig economy startup interact with customers physically (drivers, delivery personal etc) so background verification compliance is a must.

All the components of a background verification are super important – ID check, criminal check, education check, employment check, psychometric check, credit check etc. Verifying all these components gives a clear and transparent view of the candidate to the HR before onboarding. I will not be surprised if the government makes background verifications a mandatory compliance for all companies in the near future.

  • What is the significance of Background Verification Services (BGV) for Startups in the Indian Market?

Start-ups hire in large numbers as they are super high growth and also want to hire super-fast. They cannot wait for 20 days for a background verification and that’s where TraqCheck comes in. We complete most checks instantly and complete an entire background verification is a few days. This really supports start-ups and allows them to onboard candidates fast. Heavily funded startups – especially the ones that raise funds from international companies need to verify all employees as it is mandatory due to regulations. Most of the startups also belong to the gig economy and gig workers are in constant contact of customers and a background verification becomes super important in such a situation. TraqCheck uses proprietary algorithms and sophisticated technology to empower Indian startups to facilitate hiring at scale and mitigates risk.

  • Anything else you would like to add?

TraqCheck Technology:

API First Product:

TraqCheck is an ‘Application Programming Interface (API) First Product’ and integrates with any Human Resource System with just a few lines of code.

Companies can view Background Check results within their HRMS and maintain one tech stack. Different tech stacks will not be required.

Even requesting a Background Check will be automated and a team of humans will not be required to send data.

The API can be customised as per your use case. The algorithm can learn which discrepancies matter as per your hiring policies & output a hire / Not To Hire Boolean within the API.

Machine Learning Capabilities:

  • TraqCheck has completely automated the Criminal Check. The proprietary Identity Matching Algorithm takes unique identifiers off the candidate such as Name, Address etc and instantly scans all criminal records Pan India and shows a match (if any). The AI can match Criminal Cases in 30 seconds (if the data is available).
  • The Employment Verification bot instantly reaches out to the candidate’s previous employer. The AI automatically finds the HR email of the employer. Thousands of Employment Checks can be processed in a second.
  • The Identity, Address, social media & Credit Checks are completely automated and outputs are given instantly.
  • The Forgery Detection Algorithm can instantly detect Photoshopped/ Digitally Tampered ID’s & Degrees.
  • AI can identify, classify and filter data in a fraction of the time required by manual, legacy processes. You can screen candidates faster with fewer resources.
  • TraqCheck’s system is ‘End To End’ automated – As the data is inputted, the system starts giving outputs.
  • The Machine is continuously learning & becoming smarter. NoHuman / Traditional system can compete with TraqCheck in terms of Cost, Speed & Accuracy

First To Market Features

-Automated Continuous Monitoring – TraqCheck is the only company in India to offer this feature. From the moment a background check completes, a gap in information about your candidate’s records begins to form. Even if you re-run checks annually, you still lack visibility into candidate behaviour between checks. If a Criminal Case comes against the candidate post- employment, the company gets notified in real time. The algorithm runs on the data continuously and tries to find a match.

Positive Adjudication Matrix – TraqCheck’s algorithms can learn which discrepancies matter and hence only those discrepancies are red flagged. Modernising the adjudication process can help your company hire more people with fewer hours of manual adjudication. Our platform surfaces only reportable records relevant to your hiring decision, reducing risk, bias & human error.

Open AI Partnership

TraqCheck has partnered with Open AI (World’s leading AI researchers based in San Francisco) We have built various features on top of these API’s such as– categorising criminal records, computer vision for current address verification etc.

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