Right fit?

Partners in life Suruchi Wagh and Mohit Gundecha quit their lucrative jobs with the hope that their idea would find acceptance in the corporate world. There was enough information and data to establish that a confluence of behavioural sciences and technology would revolutionise HR. They held a strong belief that the HR tech company they conceived would be able to scale up in a short period. How did Jombay fare? Did they find acceptance among organisations following age-old HR processes?

Wagh, founder and COO of Jombay, used to work at RMS, a leading catastrophe modelling company, after having studied at University of Southern California. Jombay (which came from the Bengali word jomay which literally means solidifying or fit hai or jamtahai) was formed in January 2010, with the strong belief that every individual has a certain skill set which fits a particular position and sector—finding the right fit is the key. Gundecha graduated from Stanford University and later worked as head of India operations with mig33, a mobile-first community with more than 50 million users before joining as CEO in August 2010. “We saw a number of our friends and acquaintances take up jobs based on their gut feeling or anecdotal information. We thought we could enable people take an informed decision by using psychometrics,” explains Wagh. Jombay planned to use psychometrics to analyse potential candidates personality, motivation level, and help them decide what kind of career they should opt for.

The business idea took shape further after they both identified the need of companies to reimagine their HR and people processes and take data-driven (and not biased or gut based) decisions around hiring, promoting, and developing the right people. Jombay saw a huge opportunity there, especially in the Indian market as they figured that corporate India wanted tools which are simple to use and offer integrated analytics which could be customised to their competency framework.