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Duleep Deosthale, Admission Table

From academia to Silicon Valley, Duleep Deosthale has co-founded an innovative recruitment service using mobile technology. He explains how Admission Table has reached three million students in its first year and shares his thoughts about life on the business side of international education.

The PIE: You were an academic for 20 years but now you have a Silicon Valley tech startup focusing on international recruitment. How does that feel?

"The idea is to enhance existing recruitment efforts, not substitute"

DD: It’s been a lot of learning and it’s changing how I think about the academic side compared to the business side. In the academic environment there is a lot of consensus, a lot of time taken. Here it’s snap decisions. If something isn’t working you switch gears. I’ve also learned not to be risk averse. You have to be able to take chances.

It’s exciting to be able to provide educational opportunities to a larger number of students than what I could from my academic role. Now I can assist all universities, not just the one for which I was working.

“Now I can assist all universities, not just the one for which I was working”

The PIE: What’s the idea behind Admission Table?

DD: Generation C– for connected–  do not have access or have limited access to desktops or laptops for whatever reason- financially, literal access– so they depend on mobile phones to connect with the world.

Then there are universities trying to get students and not knowing how to penetrate the market. You have 500 universities, let’s say in the case of India, who are all going to the same five cities to recruit. For the students in these five cities it’s fantastic, they have 500 options, but for universities if you’re not number one, two or three, forget it! You’re not getting the best students.

So the challenge was: how do you reach out to this segment? And the answer was obvious: mobile. In India alone there are over 900 million mobile phone users. And smart phones account for about 13% of that. That is 13% of 900 million which is nearly a third of the US population. Suddenly those numbers mean something huge.

The PIE: Tell me about the interface.

DD: We wanted to make something simple keeping in mind their attention span and bandwidth. If someone is sitting at a bus stop, and has two minutes before the bus arrives- how much information do you want him or her to get to convince him or her to go to your university? So it has to be short, sweet and simple because basically they’re looking for who are you, your location, your ranking, the academic programs, the cost, and can I get a scholarship? If you answer these six questions, then it’s smooth sailing for phase 1!

If you start showing them pictures and everything else that exists on this planet, you’ve lost them. They want information, on their terms, not yours!

“If you start showing them pictures and everything else that exists on this planet, you’ve lost them”

The PIE: So it’s an app?

DD: It’s a mobile web app – we used HTML5 and browser to maximize our reach to students using all kinds of mobile phones. We are going to release an android app in the next couple of months which will help us engage better with the students.

We also have a web app for universities to manage their recruitment funnel.

The PIE:  How do you communicate with students?

DD: We connect using the dominant social media networks in a country. For example we’ve created communities like “Study.at.US” “Study.at.Australia” and “Study.at.Europe”etc on Facebook. Students usually find out about us through somebody they know because somebody they know is liking, commenting or sharing about our post. But it is all very targeted based on connection, interest and demographics. We are not interested in everyone on Facebook. These communities lead them to our platform where they can find out more about universities, admissions and connect with their choices.

The PIE: And who controls the content?

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