Astronaut Acquires POPSkul

Astronaut’s mission is to unlock barriers to speed and quality of hiring and learning, helping organisations benefit from the huge demographic advantage present in Southeast Asia, and the new hybrid working conditions globally.

Astronaut, an Indonesian and Singapore-based mobile-first recruitment platform, has acquired Indonesia’s POPSkul, a fast growing on-demand skills certification platform that brings speed and accessibility to the market. The acquisition aims to enhance Astronaut’s platform in terms of leveling up talent’s applications. POPSkul was founded by Chandra Marsono in 2020, a 20 year veteran of the education and advertising industries. Prior to the acquisition, the company has been collaborating with and leveraging Astronaut’s platform. 

Digitisation of the Southeast Asia talent ecosystem is at an inflection point and the acquisition serves as the initial steps towards building a sustainable and scalable talent ecosystem across Indonesia and beyond. “We deeply care about making online talent services accessible to all. And proven skills data leads to better and faster hiring decisions. That’s why we’re thrilled to have Chandra and POPSkul join us on our mission.” said Nigel Hembrow, CEO and Co-founder of Astronaut. 

Established in 2016, Astronaut has helped many global multinational companies, including renowned enterprises such as Boston Consulting Group, Gojek, BCA, and Korn Ferry. Astronaut has screened over 150,000 candidates as of July 2021, 50% of which was done in the pandemic. With the new acquisition, Astronaut will continue to invest in accelerating the POPSkul platform, and be integrating skills certificates into the candidate profiles in the Astronaut platform.

People are losing opportunities because they lack certification, we are here to rectify that by enabling everyone the opportunity to get certified fast.

 

Chandra Marsono
POPSkul CEO

In the current talent market, being certified is one of the best competency indicators that many employers look for. And in Indonesia, the LSK (Lembaga Sertifikasi Kompetensi) play such an important role. However, for bodies like LSK the logistics of assessing pose one of the biggest challenges in the archipelago market. For rural areas like in Eastern Indonesia, this means spending a lot of resources and most importantly, time just to get certified. “People are losing opportunities because they lack certification, we are here to rectify that by enabling everyone the opportunity to get certified fast. POPSkul eliminates all additional costs and delivers results faster for close to a thousand users in our first 3 months of launching. Joining the Astronaut family will let us make certification processes more accessible for all especially during this pandemic.” said Chandra. 

Even though the pandemic has hit very hard, the Southeast Asia recruitment ecosystem is adapting. Universities and assessment centers are showing greater appreciation towards reliable, cost-effective high quality digital tools for skills assessment, interviewing, learning, examinations and other talent processes. This adaptation is leading to great disruption in the talent ecosystem. Traditional players have been ‘forced’ to adopt digital tools to deliver their talent services, relying on talent platforms and tools, like Astronaut and POPSkul, as trusted technology platform partners. 

And the benefits of digital are clear. Usually, traditional manual recruitment processes are based on non-predictive and non-verified data with gut feel decisions, based on CVs screening, phone screening and many interviews. But new multi-purpose, mobile-first tools, like Astronaut and POPSkul, automate the testing, assessing, interviewing and skills certification processes into a ~10-min experience that candidates can do very conveniently, on-demand. Companies can then make effective and fast decisions. 

This has never been more important. For example, in Indonesia, around 8.8% (2,56 million) of the working age population are currently without a job while 30 million of fresh graduates are about to enter the workforce over the next five years, according to Indonesia Government Head of Statistics, Dr. Suhariyanto, with the pandemic impacting heavily. And with this massive available talentpool quite disconnected from employers it becomes critical for companies in Southeast Asia to rely on technology to quickly access and skill-up talent. Astronaut is leading the way in Southeast Asia. 

Astronaut enables companies to safely and effectively identify the right candidates from larger candidate pools, for both immediate hiring and to build talent pools for future hiring. It standardizes the process accurately to find the best candidate without bias and automates the hiring workflow to ensure no wasted time for candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers. Through the platform, enterprises and businesses of all sizes can uncover high quality talents, have the candidates pass through company’s assessment or tests, and streamline the internal decision-making through a simple and seamless dashboard. 

One of the successful transformation stories is Sampoerna Philip Morris. The Sampoerna HR team set the objectives for the digital transformation of their recruitment and assessment center processes, and Astronaut was able to respond with the necessary solutions, including being secure, reliable and highly cost-effective. This resulted in Sampoerna saving 89% of recruiter’s and hiring manager’s time, 90% of job seekers’ time, and making job offers 40% faster.  

“We far exceeded our goals for time and cost savings, and Astronaut is now a key part of our digital end-to-end talent acquisition process.

 

Calvin Tjiang
Executive, Philip Morris International, Sampoerna.

As a mobile-first recruiting platform powered by data, Astronaut aims to become the next generation HR technology that unlocks speed and quality of hiring. We want to offer a solution to the highly-inefficient recruitment process outsourcing industry that is expected to grow to USD40.6 billion by 2027. “Our vision at Astronaut is to create a sustainable and scalable talent ecosystem through technology in Indonesia, Southeast Asia and globally,” said Nigel. 

In addition to their focus on Southeast Asia they also have clients in Europe and New Zealand. In Q2 2021, Astronaut has grown recruitment clientele by 30% in Indonesia, Singapore, and India Market. It also commenced a student admissions partnership with National University of Singapore and is powering Kompas Group’s new online learning capability. With the fresh funds, the company is accelerating this growth with further tech innovation and more partnerships in Indonesia, Singapore, and globally. The company is now raising US$2million for a pre-series A round.