Shravan Charya’s Lets Corp is an HR solutions provider headquartered at Singapore, with offices at India, US and Brunei. Their flagship product, www.LetsCareerUp.com, is a networking and transformation portal that helps school and college students identify career paths according to their skills, competencies, aspirations and innate behavioural aspects. Academic institutions can use the platform to create course catalogues, link them to skills and competencies, and build admission pipelines. Employers can create job descriptions, publish opportunities and source appropriate candidates using the portal. In the past three years, Lets Corp has filed 47 patent applications with the Singapore Government, based on research in the HR domain. They have partnered with Deloitte and KPMG for forensic services, with CEB-SHL (UK) for Assessment services and are a worldwide partner to Microsoft.
Shravan worked with large companies like Nomura, Accenture, HCL Tech and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries before turning entrepreneur in 2011. “Very often, bright ideas are lost in the rigmarole of processes, people and email diplomacies. We should not build castles of process-centric rigidity in operations but institutionalise flexibility, innovation and the spirit of change. My biggest motivation for turning entrepreneur was to develop a business model where social transformation is the norm and not an after-thought. I began seeding a fundamental economic theory of wealth re-distribution titled True Wealth Distribution (TWD), which aims to achieve wealth and income equity and a local, national and global scale, and is the guiding force behind starting this venture,” he says.
LetsCareerUp has research partnerships with Bangalore University, Christ University and the Institute for Career Transitions, Massachusetts (founded by MIT, Boston faculty) for developing scientific competency assessment models and inventories. They are a finalist in the NSDC Innovations for Skills Challenge 2014 conducted by the National Skills Development Corporation, for which the final results will be announced soon. Some of their major clients include Accenture, Wipro, Aditya Birla Group, Tata and ITC. They follow a freemium model — mostly free for school and college students, and paid services for academic institutions and employers based on size, features/modules required and number of users. The LetsCareerUp Transformation Programme for Schools (LTPS) and Colleges (LTPC) provides career guidance, transformation and a review mechanism for students and parents.
“I started pitching our first product – LetsPlace, a recruitment management solution, to people in my mobile phone address book. One of my seniors from Accenture connected me with the HR lead. Within eight months of the engagement with them, Accenture gave LetsCorp an award as the best upcoming partner,” remembers Shravan about the early days of the venture.
They have now signed up 212 schools and 45 colleges for LetsCareerUp and plan to reach a multi-million user base across all stakeholders. The portal is live in India, Singapore and Brunei, and the global version of LetsCareerUp will be ready early next year. “We believe a portal of this nature is very useful for the kind of demographics present in India. We mirror the focus of our Prime Minister Narendra Modi — skilling India is the way forward for a strong and progressive India. LetsCareerUp has been designed and developed for up-skilling and competency development, to ensure success in one’s career,” explains Shravan.
Born in Hyderabad, Shravan grew up in Chennai, where he completed his Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Madras in 1996, followed by a management qualification from DB Jain Institute of Management, Chennai. He has a Chartered qualification from the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS), United Kingdom. A man of many interests, Shravan likes western classical music and writing poetry. His poem Kailash was awarded a medal of honour by the poetry society in England.
“It is the confidence with which you play that is important and not the technicalities in which you defend a game,” he says. Shravan was also an ardent trekker. For more details, check out www.letscorp.com.
— rohit@learnbizsimulations.com