Once rejected for job, Faridabad man now advising Singapore companies how to hire employees

Sudhanshu Ahuja, 25, has an engineering degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, but he wanted to work in the finance sector. The promise of a lucrative career in finance was enticing. However, the company he applied in rejected his “big” CV. He decided to do something to make employers go beyond the mundane exercise of picking the best written CVs and, instead, know their prospective employees. Sudhanshu created a company, Ideatory Pte Ltd, and has been advising some leading Singapore companies including the bank that had rejected him.

Sudhanshu said: “How can one judge a person on basis of some written information on a sheet of paper? When I was rejected, I wanted to tell them I have more to offer than how I answered their questions. Job applicants should rather be told to show what they are best at and not talk about it.”

Sudhanshu, who started Ideatory three years ago, holds online competitions among job applicants in fields of their respective expertise, awards them and creates a database so that a company does not have to waste time on going through hundreds of applications everyday.

“On occasions, I found that a Faridabad boy with a normal schooling background was better than some of the IITians. Without Ideatory, it would not have been possible,” said the NTU graduate.

“Data is not made public and is given to our clients alone,” he adds.

In his eight years stay in Singapore, Sudhanshu has become one of active members of HUB Singapore, a forum of like minded people using “ventures and ideas to make a better world”.

Sudhanshu’s company has raised SG $30k in start-up funding from SPRING Singapore and the rest came from his personal savings.

“Our clients have been kind to us and appreciate what we do. We run Data Challenges to help companies identify data scientists to employ. These are pre-hiring assessments we create to assess people for the jobs they are applying for in fields of data science – developers, statisticians and business intelligence personnel,” said Sudhanshu.

He has been running data challenges and Hackathons in collaboration with DBS to help them identify the right people.

“My heart was always in entrepreneurship. I was laying the groundwork for my start-up, Ideatory, for two years during my time at MAS. I identified the right teammates and developed a business model. The aim for the company was to allow people to show employers (and others) what they are good at.

“The answer was competitions on the internet. ‘Competition’ seemed to bring out the best in the people with whom I grew up with in India, and I felt it brought out the best in people worldwide as well. That’s how Ideatory was born in mid 2013 when I quit my job at MAS to build my company full-time,” said Sudhanshu.

Sudhanshu said he had always been very ambitious and believed that “entrepreneurship is the most inspiring quest for purpose in life”. He added that his grandfather, Govardhan Das Ahuja, becoming a successful entrepreneur later in his life also left a “strong impression” on him.

Today, he has three persons working for his company. “The irony is very satisfying”, said the innovative entrepreneur from India trying to provide solutions for big companies.

He said Singapore presented a lot of opportunities. But it confused him in the beginning, especially during the last two years of my engineering course.

“Just when I got through IIT-JEE entrance test and got through IIT Delhi, I got accepted into NTU on a scholarship worth SG $140,000. While I ate Chhole Bhature at the mess in IIT Delhi and took a campus tour, I had to decide whether to take the flight to Singapore the same night or stay back,” said Sudhanshu.

He graduated in technology, micro-electronics from NTU in 2011.  After he was rejected by a leading bank here, he managed to get a job at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) – the equivalent of RBI and SEBI.