Leaders

Over the years, society has witnessed a sudden upsurge in women's leadership. They have actively indulged themselves in the socio-economic, commerce, and trade realms, proving that they are capable of leading organizations. Even with all this, women are a little skeptical about joining start-ups, especially in the tech fraternity. Aligned to this, Jyoti Gouri, Director of People Ops & Talent Acquisition at CommerceIQ, voices out the need for women in the technology and start-up ecosystem.

Jyoti Gouri is an established woman who has been at the forefront in employee welfare, performance, collaboration, and efficient culture at CommerceIQ - A leading Ecommerce Channel Optimization SaaS platform that uses machine learning, analytics, and automation to optimize the eCommerce channel across the supply chain, marketing, and sales to drive profitable market share growth. CommerceIQ’s (formerly known as Boomerang Commerce) machine learning and automation SaaS platform are used by the largest consumer brands to win at the moment of purchase by automatically responding in real-time to changing variables across hundreds of their SKUs on Amazon. While the company’s primary solution started on Amazon, it has announced betas for advertising solutions on Instacart and Walmart and is rapidly evaluating additional E-commerce marketplaces.

Being the only woman in the leadership team at this tech-driven company, Jyoti Gouri emphasizes that increasing the participation of women in tech is the need of the hour – considering the market demands and women's capabilities. In an exclusive conversation with Women Entrepreneur India, Jyoti showcases the necessity to take steps towards lifting the status of women in technology, especially with start-ups for promoting a greater learning environment. She says that people should dream bigger and deep dive into big data, which is ruling now and will rule the future.

What is the inspiration behind building diversity hiring at CommerceIQ?

I am a startup enthusiast, always amazed by the out-of-box innovations at tech startups. One of the interesting aspects that I have started discovering as an HR Director is, women are skeptical about applying to start-ups.

I am a big believer that women are capable of undertaking multifarious risks, addressing challenges, tackling tech-related barriers, and generating worthy solutions. However, women applying to startups has become sort of bleak. I would say, to the young ladies out there to explore the startup ecosystem. It's okay to attempt and fail, these are part and parcel of the game. Give it a try! We at CommerceIQ, love to encourage the women to feel confident and join the tech startup community.

Highlight Your Professional Background Before Joining CommerceIQ.

My job career began as an IT recruitment consultant at Yahoo in 2008 - when India started seeing the surge in startups. Back then, Flipkart was one of the hot startups and I was fascinated. That is when I put my thoughts on figuring out if I want to be specialized in recruiting or I want to understand the length and breadth of the HR gamut from recruiting to the entire employee lifecycle. Startups were a great opportunity to experience the essence of the HR fraternity. I decided to explore jobs at startups and in 2010 I joined Stratify Software, which was working on AI and ML 10 years ago. I was amazed at its ability to hire the top talents from IITs. This was interesting and pushed me to be part of the futuristic journey. From being a recruiter to an HR leader and more, the journey has was exciting.

“As hrs we need to be good listeners, sympathetic and proactive leaders who listen to the ideas, feedback, and suggestions of the other employees”

What made you join CommerceIQ? Share the details on what prompted you to be part of the company’s journey.

My previous company, Stratify, went through series of acquisitions and finally was acquired by HP Software Enterprise Labs. However, I felt the difference after the acquisition by HP. Some people do well in a larger setup, but some people do well in a small intimate setup. And that is when I was able to understand where I see my career.

I began to figure out my next gig. In 2019, I came across Boomerang Commerce. They were a small team with entire business functions in the US and the R&D function in Bangalore. They were a team of 20-25 people and envisioned crazy growth plans. I was impressed with their vision and goals.

When I started, we had just raised Series A funding of 8.5 million. I was excited to being part of this company's journey in building teams and bringing people initiatives. Boomerang Commerce today is rebranded as CommerceIQ.

Enumerate the onboarding and hiring strategies at CommerceIQ.

CommerceIQ is a brand with crazy goals, in terms of revenue, technology, and more. Achieving these will be possible only with our high-performing team. As part of our on boarding and integrations strategies, we structure a plan of work (typically for a week) and send it to the incoming employee so that person doesn't feel overwhelmed on joining. We make it easy for them to understand how their first day will look like and how would the culture be. Many would be surprised to see this importance we give to them even before they start working with us.

Right after on boarding, we do multiple things like weekly meetings with HR, introducing to the product, processes, internal policies, and stakeholders. We bring in the new employee into the business in a very structured matter. We adhere to eight core values like Customer Obsession, Take Ownership then Deliver Results, Bias for Action, Dive Deep, Curiosity with Self Learning, Hire to Develop the Best, and Win as a Team, Think Big, Take Bets and Innovate. We ultimately look for people who believe that we can accomplish so much more together.

What up-gradation and innovations are you leveraging to enhance the recruitment and engagement in the company?

Technology is solving a lot of things for us. Especially, talking about the COVID period, it helped us to engage with our employees in a remote setup. At CommerceIQ, we use multiple tools to connect with our employees. We use Small Improvements to send feedbacks, have discussions, and more. We also integrate that with one of our internal communication channels, Slack to send accolades or praises for all the good job that our employees have been doing.

The Roadmap

Our research and development team is only in Bangalore. We are also selling sophisticated products for customers in American countries and Europe. As part of the growth plan, we look forward to doubling the headcount, which is 70 at present. We envision on boarding 150 Engineers, Data Scientists, and Analysts by the end of 2021.