Companies are hiring and one of the pain point in mass-hiring is that the entire process is quite manual, thereby taking away a lot of company resources, effort and time.
It takes hours to manually evaluate paper and pencil screening tests in a hiring event. Traditionally companies use OMR scanners to scan answers, but OMS scanners are not customizable beyond a certain point.
Bangalore based startup, SkillRack’s Quick Score solves these pain points. SkillRack’s QuickScore is a tool to automate the scoring and rank the candidates instantly based on their performance in the paper and pencil screening tests. The startup claims to score & rank 2000 candidates within 1 hour using the tool!
The service is specifically meant for campus hiring, but there is no reason why it cannot be applied to other areas (like hiring events in banks etc). Here is a brief QnA with founder of SkillRack, Karthikeyan Chockalingam.
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QN: How does the process work? Can you share the workflow once you send the scanned copy of the answer sheet?
[Answer] Once we scan the the answer sheets and get the images, we extract the data (like the exam set identifier, hall ticket number, options marked as answer) and convert into XML format.
This XML data extraction helps our software to be flexible (when compared to conventional OMR/OCR software) by configuring options like negative marking, section wise cut-off and importance and multiple exam sets with ease.
QN. How did you come across this idea?
[Answer] Not many colleges have enough number of computers to simultaneously deliver exams to a large number of candidates. Hence companies rely on paper pencil tests to screen candidates.
Though OMR/OCR scoring software has been in existence for a very long time, the flexibility to customize/configure options (like negative marking, section wise cut-off and importance and multiple exam sets) was lacking. Also they mandate an identifier (like a registration number or hall ticket number) for a candidate to take the exam.
But in reality in an off campus drive or walk in it is time consuming to issue the above said identifier to each candidate and communicate to the candidates. As a result many companies and leading assessment providers resort to manual stencil based scoring.
So we decided to bridge the gap by creating a software which will provide the flexibility and enable paper pencil scoring to involve less manual effort but at the same time score quick.
QN: Please share a few key stats – customer adoption/use cases?
[Answer] Few months ago one of the leading assessment providers in India evaluated around 5000 candidates using manual stencil based correction (as they had to apply negative marking and section wise cutoff). 20 members scored these 5000 candidates in 2 days. With SRACK-QUICK SCORE we can accomplish it in 3 hours using 2 scanning units. The probability of error is reduced as in manual correction the scoring person can induce errors due to fatigue.
SRACK-QUICK SCORE is operational from Jan 2011, and till now our clients include companies and consultancies conducting job fairs like Mu Sigma, ACC, VINJEY Software Systems, Campus Select, Coherence Consulting.
Hiring companies find their time saved in On campus hiring. Normally the pre-placement talk starts at 9AM and the exams get completed by 11 AM. Assuming around 500 candidates took the exam the scoring and ranking would take till 3 PM (assuming negative marking and multiple exam sets are involved). Both candidates and the interviewers are exhausted by the time the interview process gets completed at night say around 9 PM. But with SRACK-QUICK SCORE the results are declared by 11:45 AM and the whole process is expedited by reducing the waiting time which makes all the stake holders happy.
The importance of our automated paper pencil scoring system increases further in an off campus hiring drive or a job fair where a large number of candidates turn out and scoring has to be really quick.
QN. Future plans?
[Answer] We have rolled out SRACK-PRACTICE PERFECT as a Beta version in two colleges where company specific custom question papers can be created and delivered to college students to help them practice for screening exams conducted by hiring companies.
The delivery mode can be paper pencil based or via online (if the college has sufficient number of computers). As the scoring in both modes is automated, candidates can practice taking more number of exams. A detailed strength and weakness analysis is provided so that candidates or placement officer can identify the low performing candidates and train them further.
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Apart from Quickscore, Skillrack offers various other services related to campus hiring – right from cloud based testing services to delivering trainings online.
What’s your take on Skillrack and the pain point its targeting.
