Startup Circle: How is COHIRE helping startups hire CxO and reducing their cash burns?

A new age concept aligned to Gig Economy, COHIRE is custom-built to work for young companies looking to scale-up fast on low cash burns. It is to people what co-work is to spaces. Here startups/SMEs/ Companies can hire C-Level managers on a shared basis. Thus, they can enjoy the full benefits of a proven CXO at a divided cost. The concept is founded on the belief that top talent is hard to get. By enabling it to be shared (or Co-Hired) this concept simply maximizes the availability and accessibility of such talent. It also has several benefits that the company Founder, Vineet Arya has underlined in the interview.

About the team

Vineet Arya, Founder - COHIRE

He has over 23+ years of experience in communications, brand building and 360 degrees marketing. He has worked with some of the most-sought-after MNCs, including AMD, SanDisk, and Tata Power Solar at senior marketing positions. During his career span of 2 decades, he has managed the entire marketing bouquet; right from brand building and PR to ATL, BTL Digital Marketing.

After almost 19 years of stint in the corporate world and helping MNCs grow, Vineet decided to quit his full-time job to help young companies in managing their business functions across domains like sales, marketing, technology, product etc. He has utilized his vast experience in marketing to help start-ups scale faster with limited resources, and grow with the right set of Go-To-Market strategies.

Sridhar Raman, Director- COHIRE

Over a career of over three decades, Sridhar has led influential newspapers. He has steered startups at the CXO level and headed Marcom functions at blue-chip business organizations. He is a content, marketing communications and business strategy expert with over 30 years of leadership experience at premier business brands including The Times of India, L&T, JSPL, Gleneagles Global Hospitals, ABC For Technology Training, Business World and e-Map PLC UK.

Read Vineet talk about the startup and its future:

How did you come up with the idea?

In 2014 as a senior executive at a leading conglomerate, even as the startup economy was booming, I had several of my friends who approached me for help with their businesses in areas like operations, marketing and sales. As I began working with them purely on an informal pro-bono basis, I sensed a unique business opportunity.

Clearly, I reckoned there must be any number of young companies and entrepreneurs in need of such help from senior C-Level pros, an HR commodity always in short supply. That’s how COHIRE was born. To validate my thought, I began to sound out many business owners especially new-age entrepreneurs, on this concept. The feedback proved that it was an idea worth pursuing. For further validation and to gain an in-depth first-hand feel of this model, I gave up my job. In fact, I started as a co-hired CMO at a couple of startups. That gave me the confidence and experience to scale the business not only in Marketing but in other domains. This included Sales, Technology, Product, Operations, and Finance etc.

What is your business/market growth?

We have raised the Gig Economy concept to the CXO level. In other words, it is a Gig CXO. Typically Gig Economy in India connotes to the blue-collar space peopled by freelance content writers, designers, coders, ride-share partners, food delivery executives and so on.  COHIRE extends this concept all the way up to the CXO level, disrupting a sanctum-sanctorum thus far zealously wedded to ‘owning’ its CXOs regardless of the cost.

As the pioneers of this concept, we are treading virgin territory. ASSOCHAM predicted in January 2020 that Gig Economy in India will grow at CAGR 17% but its forecast pertained to the Blue- Collar space. Since there is no similar study dwelling on the Gig CXO economy it is difficult to predict its growth. However, we expect a 100% growth YOY in the 5 years post-pandemic.

Who are your consumers/customers?

COHIRE is a concept that can be adopted by any company but more suited to young ones. Many young companies like Vedantu, Money view, Flatworld solutions, Travel spice, ABC Technology, Pikkol, Msg Global, Innorel, mVikarsha, INCX.

However large established companies like Vidal Healthcare also found this concept to economically effective hence adopted the same as well.

People lost jobs amid the pandemic. How are you managing your business in such tough times?

The business has indeed gone through the tough phase in 2020 due to pandemic and to sail through this tough economic time they had to resort to attrition of skilled employees at all levels. To survive this period, more than anything else, businesses would have to also cut costs and minimize cash-burns especially in areas like business operations, marketing, finance, HR and technology.

The concept of COHIRE has been a boon for such companies during these tough times as they can get C level professionals across domains to work for them like there senior team members at a much lower compensation. In fact this year we have seen a much faster adoption of this Gig CXO concept compared to previous years. More so remote working has helped accelerate this concept in India as business leaders are readily warming up to the idea of hybrid working. This has been the basic premise of the COHIRE concept since its inception.

What are your Post-Covid plans?

Covid has somehow worked in favour of business adopting a different way of operating. One of them is a Hybrid way of working (partially from the office and partially from home). Since the whole concept of COHIRE is based on Gig Economics, so any C Level Professionals who are CoHired will have to follow this hybrid form of working. We have been advocating the same for the past couple of years much before the pandemic.

Since this is set to become a new norm, COHIRE is bound to also leapfrog in terms of adoption. We have already seen a good number of companies approaching us to Co-hire some of their CXO level positions. So, we are ramping up our own internal panel of C Level professionals who only wants to work as Cohiree as against regular employee job. Thus, we can cater to this increased demand. We have organically seen a lot of CXO’s from marketing, technology, sales etc. They approach us to express their desire to work as CoHiree as Gig CXO, which will soon become a new normal in India.

What is the current tech-positions related hiring scenario? Will it improve?

There is an increased interest in Gig CXOs especially from startups to have experts in the domain of AI, Cybersecurity etc. This is primarily for solving a particular issue or managing the technology team within the startup.

About the future outlook in 2021, the Gig Economy is definitely poised to grow especially after the pandemic and more at the CXO level. We, at COHIRE, are anticipating greater demand for Gig CXO’s not only in technology but in other domains as well.

What are the budding industries and are there any specific positions that have the most demands?

For Gig CXO or COHIRE concept, the most budding industries would be funded startups and mid-size companies in the field of technology and consumers products. However, we do anticipate that large organizations would also want to have Co-Hired CXO for a specific purpose or objective. We see the market opening up slowly and the demand for CXO’s would definitely increase in 2021.

How are you bridging the gap?

Businesses are not driven by machines, they are driven by C-level minds. Each of our CXOs has anywhere between 15-20 years of experience and at least 5-7 years of business leadership experience. Just what you need to convert business objectives into reality. We enable enterprises to access seed, angel or VC funds, round after round. This ensures that they keep flying and their big ideas never run out of runways. COHIRE is a game-changer that sets this right by making them easy to hire and affordable too. With powerful strategic leadership our CXOs spring open whole new business opportunities to help you unlock the full value of your business and grow at speeds you might not have imagined.