Talent discovery platforms to ease artists’ way to success

“We currently have a data base of 7,000 actors and models from Tollywood, and we are aiming to double it by the end of this year. We
are also in talks with some of the reputed film makers for lead and supporting cast”
- Vineet Bajpai, Founder and CEO of talentrack

Getting into the entertainment industry is every artist’s dream. However, the route to landing your dream job is quite daunting in an industry that is fragmented and slated for its selection process!Sensing a huge opportunity in this area, established companies to startups, including online classifieds firm Quikr, talentrack, Greenroom Now and Talent Next, are taking a plunge into the world of MECA (media, entertainment, creative and art) with their talent discovery platforms.

The second-largest employment generator in India, next only to the IT and ITeS sector, the media and entertainment industry is currently pegged at $21 billion and is poised to touch $100 billion by 2025. Hiring in the MECA space is exceptionally vibrant, and yet very unorganised and obsolete. In a way, the MECA domain sees significantly higher recruitment activity because unlike the corporate space where people get employed with a single organisation for years, artists are very fast-moving and get employed only for a few days or weeks at a time depending on the nature of the project,” says talentrack Founder and CEO Vineet Bajpai.

This increases the overall hiring velocity of the entire industry and every artist is engaged by not one but numerous recruiters. The number of recruitment transactions is unimaginable, especially when we take regional cinema, TV and advertising also into consideration. Given this diverse and intense hiring dynamics, the need for an organised and reliable online platform is very pronounced. This is where talentrack comes in,” he adds.

Founded in January 2016 and based out of offices in Mumbai and Delhi, talentrack helps recruiters and artists manage the entire hiring process, end-to-end, via its mobile app or web-based dashboards.

It brings the entire recruitment value chain online, starting with aggregating artists across categories like actors, models, singers, photographers, designers, graphic artists, musicians and dancers. Artists are onboarded via marketing campaigns on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other online channels.

What used to take weeks and months of slow and frustrating rigour can now be achieved with a few clicks, Bajpai quips.
Jumping onto the bandwagon is cross-category classifieds business Quikr, which early this month launched its talent discovery platform Dazzlr.

The platform has been developed by Quikr in partnership with Vivek Bohra, a third-generation film maker and casting director Aadore Mukherjee. Dazzlr offers tailored solutions to cater to the needs of both artists and casting professionals for a variety of entertainment formats such as cinema, TV, theatre, advertising, regional and international film production.

Dazzlr allows budding actors to list for free with a fee to apply for select roles. The platform enables production houses and casting directors to post their requirements and browse through artist portfolios to bookmark and call them for auditions.

Some of its features for artists include provisions for video and image uploads to build a portfolio and notifications to help them stay updated on opportunities in upcoming screen roles.Right from our early days, we have had entertainment as a category in Quikr. It gets half-a-million monthly unique visitors without any marketing because of the sheer size of India’s media and entertainment industry.

Artists are always looking for projects, aspirants are always looking for a break and production houses are always looking for talent. Technology can be a huge enabler in this marketplace,” opines Pranay Chulet, Founder and CEO of Quikr.

In barely a couple of weeks of testing, Dazzlr has over 70 casting directors, production houses, advertising agencies and close to 2,000 artists using the platform across India. Quikr expects Dazzlr to create an impact for talent internationally as well, going forward.

Through a mixed effort of online as well as offline marketing and promotional activities, talentrack has so far onboarded over 85,000 self-registered artists and more than 2,000 recruiters from across 600 Indian cities and towns. While its main stronghold lies in metros like Mumbai and Delhi NCR (National Capital Region), talentrack is equally popular in Tier-II and Tier-III cities in the country.

As time progresses, we see the entire media and entertainment industry’s ecosystem coming on board with over half-a-million artists and industry recruiters in thousands,” Bajpai says. Currently, talentrack supports film projects of Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada industries.

It has a database of over 7,000 actors and models from Tollywood, which it is aiming to double by the end of this year, even as it is in talks with some of the reputed Telugu film makers for casting of lead characters and other supporting cast.

talentrack, which had spent the last seven months concentrating on building the platform and hitting the critical mass in terms of users, has been in active revenue-generation mode starting this month.Our revenue model is very robust with multiple revenue streams at play.

While there are several sub-business models active on our platform simply as an outcome of the industry-aggregation we are doing, our primary revenue heads are database subscription fee from recruiters, artist premium membership revenue, advertising revenue and revenues from the community-tocommerce (C2C) model. Our immediate revenue objective is to break-even by the end of this fiscal. We are looking at generating revenues in excess of Rs 10 crore in the FY 2017-18 fiscal,” Bajpai sums up.

By:K Rajani Kanth