Deepti Chopra is a powerful Indian entrepreneur, best known for being the co-founder of Adaface, an AI-powered pre-employment testing tool to ease hiring processes worldwide. Deepti is a tech enthusiast which is very well reflected in her works throughout her life.
Deepti is one of those people who’s always had a lot on her plate. From being part of a research team at Caltech where she worked on improving the accuracy of machine learning algorithms used to predict earthquakes in California’s early warning systems, to working at Pizza Hut and handling a bulk order of 180 pizzas at once, she seems to have experienced it all!
She graduated from IIT Gandhinagar in 2014 with a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering, and a minor in Computer Science.
Success and Struggles
The first step to achieving success is putting ourselves out of our comfort zones. We experience success when we open ourselves up to the ‘what ifs’ that can potentially be made into reality. And that’s exactly what Deepti set out to do.
Before founding Adaface, she had built an app very similar to Adaface, called Jobhash, which also focused on similar goals- finding relevant candidates for job openings. One of the reasons her startup failed is that she didn’t want to step out of her comfort zone to sell.
She was an introverted founder, unable to get out of her own shell. To fix this and step foot out into the real world, she worked at Pizza Hut for a month, took bulk orders, cleaned tables, and basically learned to be accountable and fixed things that needed to be fixed.
She also worked as an engineer at Vahan.ai where she built a WhatsApp Chatbot to recruit blue-collar workers, which is used by Uber and Flipkart. Combining her internship experiences with her passion for technology and machine learning, she built one brilliance of a platform, Adaface.
Startup Idea of Adaface
Deepti and her co-founder, Siddhartha Gunti, having firsthand experience of how hiring works from the perspective of both the candidate and the recruiter, knew that there were inefficiencies in these processes.
She says, “We agree that traditional assessment platforms are not a fair way for companies to evaluate candidates because they do not test for relevant skills and instead focus on theoretical knowledge. We started Adaface to help companies find great candidates by assessing the on-the-job skills required for a role.”
Adaface Story
Companies often tend to miss out on hiring the most efficient candidates due to inefficiency in their recruitment processes, and Adaface makes sure that doesn’t happen.
Simply put, Adaface is a powerful pre-employment testing platform that eases hiring processes by making use of artificial intelligence.
Adaface provides automated and high-quality coding tests, personality tests, psychometric tests, and aptitude tests. The platform uses a conversational bot called Ada, which simulates a live interview, asking specific and most suitable questions to the candidate, and also providing feedback in real-time.
It calls itself the most candidate-friendly skill assessment platform, as it truly focuses on their on-the-job and real-life skills, instead of focusing on the skills listed on a piece of paper.
This makes companies prefer Adaface over traditional recruitment methods. “With Adaface, we were able to optimise our initial screening process by upwards of 75%, freeing up precious time for both hiring managers and our talent acquisition team alike!” says Brandon Lee, Head of People of the company- Love, Bonito.
Deepti co-founded Adaface in 2018 and just within 6 months, the company was already gaining considerable profit. Adaface is now trusted by over 20 large companies for recruitment including Vodafone, Amazon, Deloitte, UCLA, PayPal, United Nations, Adidas, Capgemini and Microsoft.
Her take on entrepreneurship and productivity
Deepti is someone who isn’t familiar with procrastination; if she knows a task is pending and can be finished in 5 minutes or less, she’s instantly at it. She says it’s one of the things that makes her more productive as an entrepreneur.
According to her, a common mistake people make as entrepreneurs is thinking that they always need to come up with the coolest brand idea to be able to sell it.
But sometimes, it’s all about being simple and creating something people can and will actually make good use of and can solve their problems effectively, just like she did with Adaface.