Harvard-Backed Experfy Aims to Disrupt the Big Data Consulting Industry

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Image: Flickr, kris krüg

By Stephanie Walden2014-04-27 03:59:13 UTC

Big data may be the next big thing, and as with many such trends, the field presents a new frontier for the job marketplace.

Entrepreneurs Harpreet Singh and Sarabjot Kaur recognize this potential, and aim to capitalize on the increasing demand for data specialists with Experfy, an online platform bootstrapped out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. The Experfy team aspires to disrupt the rapidly growing big data consulting sector by creating a marketplace for qualified professionals (primarily freelancers and contractors), vendor companies and enterprises.

Filling a gap in the big data job marketplace

Reports suggest that the need for data experts is growing, and demand is on track to hit unprecedented levels by 2018. For experts in the field, taking on freelance or contract projects can translate into thousands of dollars in extra income.

In Kaur's previous role as the founder of a digital agency, she noticed a gap in the marketplace for hiring virtualized talent on a project-per-project basis; she also found that utilizing sites such as Elance or Freelancer often proved frustrating.

"It required a great deal of patience to hire four or five people before we could find one who could perform the job," she explains. Experfy co-founder Singh, whose background includes work for large corporations like Citigroup, experienced a similar disconnect with big consulting firms. "Corporate strategy appeared to be synonymous with corporate waste, largely because the right talent was not involved," says Singh. "Spending six figures on a deck was not uncommon, and there were no cheaper alternatives."

Experfy co-founders Sarabjot Kaur and Harpreet Singh.

The pair joined forces to address this supply and demand imbalance, creating a consulting marketplace for mid-to-large-sized companies looking for on-demand work.

What distinguishes Experfy from other freelancer-oriented services and talent crowdsourcing sites is that the platform performs an extensive vetting process for applicants — both the experts seeking work and the companies posting projects go through a highly selective application process before they can utilize the service. The platform is also secure — an important consideration for companies worried about confidentiality. Because Experfy only accepts what they deem to be the highest quality professionals, admittance to the site offers a degree of prestige.

In addition, the platform caters exclusively to data and business intelligence projects and professionals. "Experfy is not a generic marketplace with people from graphic design, programming, writing, accounting, PR and marketing backgrounds, all jumbled up on a single platform. The clients don’t have to sift and weed out people with unrelated expertise — we do it for them," says Kaur. A few of the titles one might expect to see on the site include data engineer, data scientist, data mining expert, statistician, mathematician, econometrician, digital analyst and big data solutions architect, among others.

Connecting companies with the top talent

Applying is a five-step process that ensures parties on both ends of the equation — both the data experts and the companies looking to hire — are cream-of-the-crop professionals. It's mandatory for both experts and company representatives to sign up via LinkedIn. They then have the opportunity to build out a profile complete with titles/professional roles, industries and expertise, availability, hourly rates, links to Github and Stack Overflow profiles and other relevant information; applicants also include a more in-depth narrative about their skills and experience, as well as a video pitch. The Experfy selection team then carefully reviews each application and decides to accept, wait-list or reject the candidate and/or company.

For enterprises, Experfy may prove a time-saver. Hiring full-time talent can be a drain on company resources and requires extensive screening and interviewing. Companies can sign up for the site in much the same way as data experts, and the platform allows for multiple team members (though each member must be vetted on an individual basis).

Once accepted to the platform, Experfy offers a number of resources to facilitate communication and easy back-and-forth conversations, such as instant message and videoconferencing features in the Experfy Project Room.

Kaur says that, given market demand, it's unsurprising that the platform has already seen a number of high-profile applicants."You'll find one of the CIOs of Harvard, as well as chief analytics officers and chief data officers with an average of 30+ years of industry experience under their belt [on our platform]," she says. "It is only on Experfy that one can hire this caliber of talent on-demand."

For now, Experfy takes a cut of each transaction once a project has been completed — Kaur says this percentage is a "moving target," and adds that the platform is experimenting with other forms of monetization. "We are building a full ecosystem around data science; other business models will eventually emerge," she says.

The ultimate goal is for Experfy to become the "de facto destination" for companies looking to solve burdensome data-related problems. "If we are successful, we will mark the beginning of the virtualization of high-end consulting," says Kaur.

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