A rapidly developing nation, India has been home to innumerable young resources with the potential to remodel the industrial arena by the virtue of their experience and expertise. However, while recruiting them, the ‘personality traits’ of the hired candidates are often ignored by the employers which not only create a gap in the company’s workforce but also impact the overall flourishing of the individual. To address this dearth of sustainable recruitment method, Akanksha Toor Dua came forward with her unique initiative Avathara which not only assist the corporate conglomerates with finding the right candidates but also create a sustainable environment in the company where people love their job, witness a healthy and interactive culture and enjoy their work life. Under the guidance of Akanksha, Avatharahas emerged as a one-stop boutique firm offering recruitment solutions, psychometric testing, employee welfare counselling and employee engagement initiatives/ activities for clients.

Engaging in an exclusive interaction with the Women Entrepreneurs, Akanksha Toor Dua reveals her journey as one of the premium entrepreneurs of the country who is spearheading her brainchild Avathara with a notion of refurbishing the recruitment domain.

What is your perspective towards the evolution of women’s entrepreneurship? Share your experience of being a women business person.

We have been enjoying the country’s freedom for the last 6 decades but for women of our country, we are still expected to take permissions and be submissive towards the male gender. It breaks my heart to see how even educated parents stop their girls to go out and live their professional dreams. The education about the need of working women needs to be given to our Indian Parents rather than just complaining about society at general. I have been truly blessed to be born in an open-minded house and luckily, I have never witnessed the most commonly used term called ‘Glass ceiling’ at work so far. With the change coming in the society, we can witness that women are being accepted as a good resource at work and are remarkably handling family and work-life simultaneously.

Tell us about the concept of Avathara along with its focus areas and approaches. Elaborate on the methods it observes to do so.

Focused on the entire employee life cycle, we help in maintaining the organisation’s healthy culture by initiating employee engagement activities and employee counselling, build operations, set the required talent force and continue their business journey smoothly. Our focus areas include Psychometric Testing, Head Hunting, Corporate Counselling and Employee Engagement.

Implementing a psychometric test, we provide objective data that can ensure a better all-round view of a candidate’s suitability by measuring several attributes including intelligence, critical reasoning, motivation and personality profile. Our strength lies in the areas of profiling the candidate's Personality type and understanding his/her key areas of Interest and Aptitude. Through Head Hunting, we review and source the talent pool that is designed to have a huge impact across the organisation. We have a sharp focus on addressing our client’s specific requirements built on a foundation of quality consciousness and perseverance.

Since the employee-work contract has changed, compelling business leaders to build an organisation that engages employees who are sensitive, passionate, creative contributors, we cater to employee engagement programs and help corporates to build necessary skills in their employee’s personalities through Corporate Counselling and Employee Engagement.

As a founder of the company, what are the new strategies that you are looking to leverage in the coming years to significantly improve the performance of the company?

Our basic strategy will always be to keep adding more and more clients and increase our offered services. Apart from engaging with New-Gen startups and broadening our work portfolio with them, we are moving towards permanent college campus placement tie-ups and increase our campus hiring. We are trying to get more involved in creating and sustaining cultures in these companies and work from scratch to build up these start-ups by getting involved in their induction systems, creating organisational policies for them, taking care of all HR and Admin related operations and so on. From the Mental health perspective we are also collaborating with another venture in this space - INNER BUDDHA, an AI Powered Emotional Bot which is like your digital companion or 24X7 available friend with whom you can discuss your problems.

“We have a sharp focus on addressing our client’s specific requirements built on a foundation of quality consciousness and perseverance”

We would also be investing soon in the Applicant tracking system to keep the tap on all our past candidates who were not looking for a job change at a particular time, but will be ready soon. By tracking down the profile and looking for an ideal job position that is a correct fit for them, we will move into a digital space as we will have to build proper tech software for the same.

Since the inception, how has the company nurtured itself? Illustrate on the growth of the company in terms of revenue, clients and geographical presence?

As a self-funded sole proprietorship firm, we started our business in 2017 in just Delhi/NCR with only 2 clients and booked revenue of 6L in 2017-18. We soon expanded and moved to pick up more clients from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and increased our revenue to 16L in 2018-19. Currently, we are working with more and more start-ups and have booked revenue of 38L in 2019-20 financial year. We have shown more than 100 percentage growth every year and we hope to keep up our hard work. We assume that we are one of the very few Indian Recruitment firms that engage with Psychologists and provide the option of psychometric testing to our clients.

Akanksha Toor Dua, Founder, Avathara

With more than 4 years of entrepreneurial experience, Akanksha has been in the recruitment space for close to 6 years, since the commencement of her career with a USA based company called Philip-Yates. She has worked closely with Indian start-ups like askme.com, mabelkart.com, hike messenger, and more. Holding a Master’s Degree in Organizational Psychology from Amity University, Akanksha’s competency and proficiency is in the domain of Industrial Psychology. An adherent professional of Psychometric testingfrom last 3 years and she has administered more than 100 tests. She is currently pursuing her second masters in psychology (PGDCFT) in order to increase her learnings about human behaviour.

Hobby: Culinary Arts, Painting, Adventure Sports and Travelling

Favourite Cuisine: Thai, Middle- Eastern and Italian food, but nothing beats Ghar ka bhindi sabzi with boondi raita.

Travel Destinations: Mt. Kailash, Europe, Himachal