Team Members:

Ashish Vikram Singh

Nikita Dua
Rajshree Vijay
Mrinal Madhukulya
Shayantan Ghosh
Pritesh Nisar

INTRODUCTION
India is the fastest growing economy in the world & the growth

has been dynamism for service sector & growing at double

digit rate.
The strongest growth in 1990s was in business services
particularly IT & ITES.
With advance in technology, it has become possible to deliver
services over long distance at reasonable cost.
With a favorable demographic profile, English being widely
accepted medium of communication, low cost offshore work
translating into average saving 25-40% of cost.
India has the largest talent pool in the world which is 1.5 times
that of China & twice that of US.

 India ranks 1 in the availability of scientists & engineers, 5 in

the quality of math & science education, quality of business

management schools is rated at 6.
India has 272 universities, 58 deemed universities, 1600
colleges & more than 1000 Engineering & Management
institutions with total enrollment totaling to 9.3 million.
India churning out 2.3 million graduates & 3 lac postgraduates
every year & boasts of of close to 4 lac engineers, more than 1
lac management graduates, 25,000 medical doctors & 12,000
PhDs.

MERIT-TRAC: Emergence of a Strong Idea

Merit-Trac was conceived by Madan Padak, an IT professional

with stints at Wipro, Infosys & BFL Software.

Idea that led to launch of Merit- Trac was conceived when
Madan was catching up with two of his friends- Krishna &
Suresh- who were running a software venture called First Shot
which was into financial risk management software products.
First Shot had been asked by its leading client to develop
software product to manage its question bank for prerecruitment testing
Madan realized that building a service around this could add
value to clients & represented a potential business opportunity.

 In the booming IT industry in 2000, Aptitude Tests were

commonly used by IT & other engineering firms to filter

candidates for interview.
Idea was to provide testing & assessment services to corporate
to help them in recruiting big numbers, which was the
emerging need.
After discussion they identify key activities- such as test
design, paper printing, test administration & post test feedback
Merit-Trac was launched in August 2000.

Beginning of Journey
First Shots technical & administrative resources to get the basics of

Merit-Tracs product & services up & running.

The core content management system developed by Suresh &
Krishna was modified using technical resources available from First
Shot.
For activities involved in delivering Merit- Tracs services, such as
printing test sheet, locating test centers, finding test supervisors,
collecting & grading test papers, etc., they relied on administrative
support from First Shot.
First customer was none other than Wipro, Pratik Kumar, Executive
VP(HR) at Wipro was one of the first people to give his vote of
confidence when Madan approached him with the concept in 2000.

Finding an Angel Investor

In next few months Merit-Trac had come a long way. By

November 2000,the business had:

For customers- two of which were blue-chip companies
A founding team with a complementary set of skills and
experience.
A modest office space
Revenue of $10,000

MANTRAS OF SUCCESS
Volume Game
Typically, Merit-Trac assesses around 75,000 candidates every
month.
From April 2006-March 2007, Merit-Trac tested around
7000,000 candidates and they have assessed over 1.5 million
candidates till date.
IT industry has absorbed around 50-60 thousand fresh recruits
and BPO 125,000 in the year 2004 whereas year 2005 created
75,000 new jobs in IT & 150,000 in BPO sectors.
BPO sector alone is expected to need manpower of 1.1 million
by 2008.

 Given that the applicant- offer ratio is around 8-10% one can

imagine the number of applicants required to be processed by

IT & BPO industry.
This speaks volumes in terms of opportunity for Merit-Trac,
which still happens to be the only major player in the
recruitment process outsourcing space.
Merit-Trac takes care of ICICI One Sources recruitment back
office and also part of the selection process.
It has screened over 300,000 candidates in 2006 for the BPO
sector averaging 20,000-30,000 candidates every month.

Assessment Process
Merit-Tracs job starts from the moment client forwards these

resumes for initial screening.

Resumes are screened on the basis of parameters defined by the
client, short listed candidates are then scheduled for
assessments & those who manage to clear it are scheduled for
interviews.
Assessments are broadly classified into 4 broad areas.
Merit-Tracs content bank has over 60,000 questions that are
constantly updated.
150 experts on various subjects from across the globe chip in to
help Merit-Trac develop its test .

 Model based on license cost per candidate assessed and a variable

cost per transaction.

Numerically, this can be as low as Rs 150 ($3-4) per BPO candidate
& Rs 600-700 ($13-15) per IT candidate & vary depending
multiplicity, customizing & difficulty of test.
Focus and Neutrality
Merit-Trac has managed to clock growth rate of 300% in the initial
few years
It is an Assessment-Only company & nothing to do with training &
staffing.
Very clear in their minds that the company will work in his domain
only & built credibility by focus.

SERVICES OFFERED
Recruitment Assessment
Accessing and hiring quality talent is becoming challenging in
a people driven economy.
Toughest task is to understand the availability of talent pools,
sifting through this dynamic talent pool & choosing the
candidates that best fit with the job-role & organisation.
Imperative for companies to get it right the first time to have
healthy and productive workforce.
Merit- Tracs suite of tests is over 300 areas spanning
communication skills, general abilities spanning
communication skills, general abilities, domain knowledge &
personality profiling.

Lateral Assessment
It contains a specialized suite of tests to meet the special
demands of evaluating lateral candidates
Tools like Code Trac-the online software testing tool help track
the skill & application of a candidates knowledge.
Employee Assessment
There is a need for periodic evaluation of employees within an
organization .
Merit-Trac provides customized Employee Assessment for
clients that provide a validated measure of employees
capabilities in future.

Educational Assessment
Pariksha the Education Assessment service from Merit-Trac
assists in making the whole examination process efficient while
maintaining the highest principles of fairness & transparency.
Pariksha provides scientifically designed test content & helps
deliver exams online through 21 state-of-the-art assessment
centers spread across 16 cities.
Pariksha provides online test delivery & offline mode with
Merit-Tracs proven capability of delivering offline
assessments in over 100 cities across India.

Entry in Education Domain

Signing agreements with various State Governments-like

Karnataka, West Bengal & Orissa & Kerela.

Entry in this sector influenced by the fact that entry-level
recruitment constitutes 17% of total recruitment market.
Team-Lease employment survey states that 93% of the
surveyed are recruiting people at the entry level.
Most organizations are targeting the local engineering colleges
for fresh talent.

 Since this is a huge task & does not fall into core business, the

companies are not going to do it themselves, this present, a

huge potential to assessment companies like Merit-Trac.
The company has planned to enter education domain by tying

up with State Government & educational institutions.

Educational Products:
Campus-Trac
Research Reports

Campus-Trac Initiative
Tries to enhance the employability of fresh graduates from

academic institutions.
Program provides detailed feedback to students/colleges/
universities on strengths & weakness which aid them in
bridging these skills through training interventions, thereby
enhancing employability.
For industry partners, Campus-Trac will create a platform for
increasing the available talent pool in the medium term.

 Trac-Skills the Certification Program for IT, BPO, Services &

MBA Talent Pools has assessed & provided structured

feedback on industry-readiness to thousands of candidates
across country.
Trac-Skills are endorsed by several companies across sectors &
partners with academic institutions like Bharathiar University
& VTU
Under this the company has tied up with number of educational
institutes.

RESEARCH REPORTS
National Index-Communication Skills

Engineering Talent pool report

National Index-Communication Skills

The national-index communication skills (NI-CS) was an
index created to map the communication skills of the
talent pool for the BPO as well as other sectors.
It aimed at getting a better insight into the dynamics of
talent supply with respect to its communication skills.
It successfully built a rich performance based data of over
200000 perspective candidates.

Engineering Talent Report

One of the unique efforts of Merit-Trac to understand
the profile of Indian engineering students, quantify the
relevant skills, identify gaps and lastly bridge gaps if any
in demand and supply of industry recruits.
It objective was to assess the performance of Engineering
students pan India and evaluate the differences in
competencies that exist between diff geographic regions.
The sample size for these tests was 25000 candidates and

800 campuses across India.

Merit-Trac- Present Scenario

Merit-Trac at present is Indias largest Skills assessment
Company, which has worked for 150 clients and assessed
over 1.5 million candidates.
It designs and delivers assessments for both corporates

and entrepreneurs
It has established networks with a lot of leading
companies like HSBC, ICICI, GLT etc.

MEG Announces Investment in Merit-Trac

In Nov 2005, Merit-Trac brought on board HSBC Private

Equity where they invested US$3.8 Million .

MEG also announced its investment by which they will acquire
stake existing financial investor-HAV2 (Mauritius) Limited
advised by HSBC and will infuse additional equity into MeritTrac, leading a majority stake over 70%.
With a total workforce of over 450 people, the combined entity
now have executed over 2 million tests.
As majority stakeholder MEG will play a strategic role & will
join Board of Directors of Merit-Trac, & support its growth in
newer markets & Merit-Trac will operate as an independent
asssessments/testing service provider.

Future Challenges
Merit-Trac will now be expanding its range offerings across

both the corporate & education segments, expanding its retail

offerings, as well as entering newer segments.
As Merit-Trac gears up to expand its presence in education
domain & strengthen its position it has to find ways to close the
gaps, which come from Assessments-Only position.
Improve the quality of manpower & bridge this manpower gap
Merit-Trac decides to enter training domain, they should do it
by themselves or through joint venture with an established
player in industry, so that they can keep focus & neutrality.