More than 40 million students are currently enrolled in Indian education at undergraduate or postgraduate levels. Over 5,000 companies are regularly engaging with Indian campuses across multiple disciplines and domains to meet their hiring needs. And yet, there is a massive demand-supply mismatch. Too many students cannot find the right jobs and too many companies cannot find the right talent. Step up Unstop, which launched in its current digital avatar in May 2021. Collecting and analysing the aforementioned data, Unstop has found a way to simplify connections between recruiters and freshers by “building a playground for talent to learn, upskill, showcase their skills, gain CV points and get hired while unlocking their true potential through their academic journey”.
With an average traffic of three million monthly users and more than 47 million monthly pageviews from 20,000 plus colleges in India, Ankit Aggarwal, the founder-CEO, and his Delhi-based team (with a small sales team in Bengaluru) are helping Unstop become unstoppable. “The idea for Unstop was born during my MBA days, when I was interested in participating in various corporate engagements but realised that information about such events wasn’t reaching me in time,” says Aggarwal, 38, who began Unstop in 2017 as a blog called Dare2Compete. Revenue generation was not the goal at that point, with the blog serving primarily as an aggregator of information. Four years later, once Aggarwal invested into his idea full-time, the pivot to what Unstop has become today came about naturally.
‘Any student from any campus can get hired by any company’
Unstop ‘democratises hiring and encourages merit’, according to its founder-CEO Ankit Aggarwal
At present, Unstop allows college and university students to access the best opportunities in the Indian job market irrespective of their academic institution or geographical base. “Any student from any campus can get hired by any company. That’s the USP on Unstop. You don’t have to be in a big city or from a top-tier college to apply, which democratises hiring and encourages merit,” explains Aggarwal. Students can also sign up for competitions (organised by companies and hosted by Unstop) to earn prizes, rewards, pre-placement interviews and internships, receive mentorship and guidance from industry leaders and gain access to a gold mine of upskilling resources such as courses, articles and workshops (all of which can be accessed through Unstop’s website).
As for companies, which help Unstop generate its revenue, Unstop offers end-to-end hiring solutions based on identifying the right skills and personalities for specific roles. To give an example, Aggarwal mentions the case of “Walmart in 2022, when it wanted to hire 100 female coders in India, but were only able to get 50 by reaching out to IITs and NITs. Once we came on board, we launched a campaign called ‘CodeHers’. The campaign is in its third season right now and this time we’ve managed to get almost one lakh female coders”. Apart from Walmart, Unstop’s clientele includes Flipkart, Amazon, Tata, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Loreal, Accenture, Ernst & Young, Optum, KPMG, Uber Boat, Aditya Birla Group and Reliance Mahindra, among others.
During campaigns or competitions (as was the case with Walmart), Unstop manages the entire logistical operations on its platform, with all the rounds taking place on the website. Companies are able to monitor the profiles and the progress of all the participants at every stage, while students can fare better at such events by taking up Unstop’s courses to unlock and enhance knowledge, be it in coding, interviews, essay writing or cyber security. Impressive performances in these competitive exercises also bolster students’ CVs, propelling them in a field stacked with potential. While the rest of Unstop’s facilities are free for students, the courses and select mentorship sessions can be unlocked for a fee.
‘We want to make Unstop so big that LinkedIn says that it’s the Unstop for working professionals’
Ankit Aggarwal’s long-term goal is to make Unstop into a global platform for early career professionals
In terms of geographic distribution, Aggarwal says that south India drives the most traffic for Unstop, followed by north, west and east. As of February 2024, Unstop has eight million overall users with more than 8,000 companies listing their opportunities on the platform. In the face of such staggering numbers, the obvious question is how much more Unstop can grow. “The big picture goal is to be a global platform and connect early talent or students sitting in any city in any country to the Apples and the Teslas of the world. But when we think of India alone, there’s scope to increase our user base by five times, given the number of students in the country,” shares Aggarwal, who has no misconceptions about his competitors: “I keep telling my team that everyone from Google to Facebook, from LinkedIn to Naukri to Glassdoor is our competitor. Some of them help companies create their brands to attract talent and some of them specialise in sourcing and sorting talent. We want to do both, but with a niche for early career professionals.”
Aggarwal takes a short pause before hammering home the scale of his ambition: “Right now, I often say that Unstop is a kind of LinkedIn for students. We want to make Unstop so big that LinkedIn says that it’s the Unstop for working professionals.”
