Chennai: It’s quite common these days to read in newspapers about crimes committed by employees of blue-collar jobs. In some cases, staff like caretakers, security personnel, drivers, etc, have even gone to the extent of murdering or looting people in their workplaces.
So, if you have recruited people for your firm but are concerned about their background, you can now heave a sigh of relief. Bengaluru based Trusted Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd and iAccept Softwares Pvt Ltd offers an employee background tracing application called Pehechano.
The companies’ founder and chief evangelising officer, B Mohan Kumar speaks to News Today about the application and his entrepreneurial journey.
Excerpts:
Q: You were a mechanical engineer earlier. How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur?
A: I am originally from Coimbatore. After completing mechanical engineering at Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, I joined Hindustan Motors in 1984 as a vendor development engineer and worked on the second generation Contessa. At one point of time, I also started learning software in a bid to make a shift in my career. Then, I did my masters in industrial engineering at Ambedkar Institute of Productivity and worked as an assistant director in NPC. After successfully learning programming, I worked with ABC Consultants as a general manager. In 2002, I decided to pursue entrepreneurship with the experience of working in varied fields.
Q: Tell us about Pehechano.
A: Since 2002, I have developed many software and Pehechano is my latest venture. It’s a free cloud-based background tracing application for recruitment process where applicants are screened of their past activities. If they have any criminal record, they will be red-flagged and can be rejected. This way, job seekers with malicious intent can be effectively filtered out by companies thereby paving way for a reduction in crime rates in jobs, especially blue-collar ones.
Q: How does your application work?
A: Pehechano is a crowd-sourced repository of validated multiple identities of people. If a person is recruited, Pehechano can be fed with his / her data like fingerprint, Aadhaar, PAN, Driving License and, most importantly, mobile number. When an employee commits a crime, he can easily get a bail and apply for another job.
But, when the new recruiter feeds any of that candidate’s details in Pehechano, all of his / her past negative activities recorded by the previous employer will be listed with a red flag. When this initiative spreads all over the country, wrong-doers won’t be able to survive and they will think twice before committing any crime.
Q: If an employer gives a bad feedback due to vengeance, won’t it spoil the career of an innocent employee?
A: This is quite a rare phenomenon and employers won’t give negative feedback without any reason. Also, the application can be used only by registered firms employing multiple people. Another aspect of the application is that if law enforcers get involved in detecting crimes committed by Pehechano registered employees, they can be tracked even if they run away using some of our tools. We also have an option to edit the feedback. If the employee proves in court his/ her innocence, the required changes can be made in Pehechano.
Q: How has the response been so far? Who are your prime customers?
A: We launched the software a few months ago and already we have more than one lakh registrations from over 100 companies. Our prime customers are service agencies employing maids, securities, delivery personnel and so on. Blue Dart, Raphacare, Pioneer Home Healthcare and the managements of many apartment complexes, housing associations and schools have turned out to be the greatest beneficiaries of our software.
Q: What other products do you offer?
A: We have three more applications, iAccept, Thijori and iCheck360. iAccept is a routing platform which connects job seeker to prospective employers. It has a scoring mechanism that monitors adherence to ethics and credibility. Thijori is a vault-on-cloud helping organisations and educational institutions to park documents of their ex-employees / students. The documents are uploaded by the authors thereby ensuring that they are trustworthy while the beneficiaries can only download or electronically share. iCheck360 is a platform designed to provide objective information to potential employees.
For details, Mohan can be contacted at 9845208784. Readers can also visit http://www.pehechano.com