Why More Indian Startups Should Consider Acqui-hiring? Acqui-hiring mutually benefits both organizations by building on their existing knowledge, enabling them to work towards a common goal.

Every year, the start-up ecosystem in India is hit by a number of trends. But as we shift to a new year we decide if a particular trend is worth keeping or not. Of late, many start-ups have adopted the concept of "acqui-hiring'. By definition, acqui-hiring simply means, to buy out (a company) primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff, rather than for its products or services. Tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google are the major performers of talent acquisitions. In India, also the trend is catching up with startups like Swiggy, RailYatri and Urban Ladder recruiting good talent from other smaller firms.

Entrepreneur India spoke to few startups to know why is acqui-hiring a really smart strategy for start-ups.

Provide Mutual Benefit To Both Parties:

Aloke Bajpai, CEO & Co-Founder, ixigo believes that the idea of acqui-hiring an existing organization is to combine expertise from another set of smart entrepreneurs with our own. This mutually benefits both organizations by building on their existing knowledge, enabling them to work towards a common goal.

Last year, ixigo had acqui-hired mobile content sharing app Reach.

"When we onboarded the Reach team, we took our vision of empowering every Indian traveller with trustworthy & personalized travel recommendations a step further. Our main aim has always been to simplify the lives of travellers. With their technical prowess and innovative thinking, together we wanted to churn out a lot of smart offerings for our users," shared Bajpai adding that Reach brought oodles of enthusiasm along with assuring users some awesome developments.

Hire Employees With Certain Skill Sets :

Acqui-hire is a smart way of enhancing the parent company's talent pool. Manish Rathi, CEO & Co-Founder RailYatri, feels it is a quick and comparatively easier way of adding certain skill sets which match up to the end goal of the company.

"Instead of individually looking out for talent and hand holding the same, acqui-hiring brings the advantage of smooth amalgamation of talent and skills. RailYatri in its recent acqui-hire almost instantly added deep ground level experience of YatraChef-a technology start-up in the transit food delivery space. Our company can now look forward to delivering outstanding user experience and spanning their reach in a very short time." said Rathi.

However, he also emphasized that in a acqui-hire deal, the business goals of both the companies need to align. A miss-match, on the other hand, can ruin both the companies.

Save Time and Effort:

If your startup is entering a new market or is looking to expand for any other reason, it will need to hire new resources. In the ordinary course of affairs, this would involve putting out a word in the market and on hiring platforms that you're looking for someone with these skills. Startups will spend massive resources on finding the right candidates, interviewing them, and testing them. If the companies are not meticulous, they will end up spending extra time and money anyway when the employees aren't always up to the mark. After that, these employees will have to go through some kind of training period as well, and their fit with the team while hiring other people to work around these individuals will just new levels of complexity and expense.

Anurag Avula, Co-founder and CEO, Shopmatic emphasized, an acqui-hire takes care of all these problems.

"You get people with relevant skill sets, their body of work and role laid out cleanly for you, and you get a fully functional team. They're unlikely to require training, and the team comes readymade so there are no concerns about the fit. These employees can help you hit the ground running for your expansion, and offer exceptional value and saving of time and effort," said Avula