Amid an unemployment crisis, meet the startups throwing a lifeline to millions of Indians

Photo credit: Sam Hawley

Twelve years ago, a young man from the Himalayan hills landed at my doorstep in Delhi. He was a grade 11 dropout, and had heard that I needed a driver. Since he had a reference from someone in the neighborhood, I let him do a test drive. It was exceptionally good, and a dozen years later, he is still working for me.

I got lucky. In India’s vast blue collar market, getting a good employer-employee fit is not easy.

Word-of-mouth is how drivers, domestic helps, delivery boys, cooks, and the like find jobs in this country of 1.2 billion people. Typically, this has meant going without a CV or landing a job that doesn’t match skills or expectations.

“Networks in India tend to focus on the community, which can be quite constraining,” explains Vir Kashyap, co-founder at Babajob, a portal for blue collar jobs started by Sean Blagsvedt in 2007.

“When we stepped into the picture, this category was the underserved part of the market,” he says. “Employers would send out word (through their contact persons), distribute fliers, and put up signage on the streets.” Unlike those seeking white collar jobs, the masses did not have the same kind of access to computers.

But in the last few years, something has changed.

Photo credit: CIAT.

Thanks to growing internet connectivity, much of it via smartphones, millions of jobs can be found online. A survey in 2009 showed that job hunting was the most popular internet activity for Indians after emailing.

With India now being the second largest market for smartphones, and the number of internet users spiralling, there has never been a better time to look for jobs online.

That leaves the field wide open for marketplaces for blue collar jobs like Babajob, Aasaanjobs, Quikrjobs, and KicksSartJobs.

Hey presto, you have a job

Many of the men and women who leave their villages and small towns to find employment in big cities have neither the education nor the skills for white collar jobs. As many as 47 million young Indians are believed to be unemployed. Blue collar jobs are thus a lifeline.

Photo credit: Meena Kadri

Dinesh Goel, CEO and co-founder of Aasaanjobs, says they wanted to create a platform to cater to some of the most important needs of the masses in India. “‘Jobs’ was something we instantly identified as the focus area.”

His two-year-old startup claims to have found more than 100,000 successful matches and serves multiple industries such as logistics, telecoms, retail, pharma, and IT.

QuikrJobs, which came about a year ago, has over 3 million candidates on board and offers over 40 job categories. These are jobs that pay under US$523 a month.

Leading player Babajob has 7 million registered job seekers who submit over 450,000 applications per month for jobs across India. It posts over 1.1 million jobs across 26 different categories from data entry operator to steward to helper, the average salary being approximately US$160.

These online marketplaces have obvious advantages over government-run employment exchanges, recruitment agencies, or newspaper ads in this day and age. While the sheer reach of government institutions cannot be paralleled by private recruiters, the former have been slow to come online.

Startups reduce the time taken to find an appropriate job and also bring more freedom of choice.

Vir points to other problems. “Employment exchanges, for instance, look at volumes. They are incentivized to close a deal as quickly as possible, and not necessarily look at the suitability of a candidate for a job,” he says.

Babajob co-founder Vir Kashyap.

A high attrition rate is one of the problems plaguing the blue collar job segment, and a poor employer-employee fit is one of the reasons.

Also, traditional job recruiters charge the job aspirants – something most startups do for free.

But can a clutch of startups really help solve India’s unemployment problem? “While we don’t create jobs, we help companies hire far more efficiently, be more profitable, grow, and hire more,” says Vir.

Reaching job seekers

Babajob has ‘a missed call for jobs number,’ which a candidate can ring up to initiate the process of registration and get job alerts. Their Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) system is available in at least six languages.

“By operating purely through mobile phones, this system allows aspirants to register on Babajob, create a profile, find, and apply to relevant jobs, regardless of the jobseekers’ internet connectivity or literacy,” says Vir. It is available to anyone across India who has access to a mobile phone and is free.

The company has a mobile web platform, an app, and is coming up with a chatbot too. “A chatbot will give more flexibility,” says Vir.

Aasaanjobs reaches out through three channels – a partner network, in-house recruiters, and marketing. “We, however, put a very heavy focus on our partner network,” says Dinesh.

Aasaanjobs founder Dinesh Goel.

The partner network is essentially a marketplace of freelance recruiters, small to medium recruitment agencies, and consultancies. “We have brought more than 2,000 such agencies on our platform. Such agencies get anywhere between 20 to 50 job seekers on a daily basis,” says Dinesh.

Many of the startups also verify candidates, though not directly but through partner agencies.

Dinesh believes the biggest challenge in the blue collar segment is a candidate turning up for an interview and, thereafter, retention. “We think a transparent recruitment process can help solve the problem.”

What about skill development for candidates? Some online recruiters have waded into that too.

Hunarr is one such platform. “It is a solution to how our job seekers get themselves trained in skills they desire or require for placements. On the other hand, most of our clients train the selected candidates post recruitment,” says Dinesh of Aasaanjobs.

You grow, we grow

Job marketplaces make money by charging the job givers. For instance, Babajob, which works with Uber, Dunzo, Zoomcar, and Runnr for instance, has customized plans for large enterprises.

At the Babajob office.

Then there is a Rapid Hire Plus Plan which allows households and small and medium-sized businesses to call up to 100 applicants and feature at the top of job listings. Seventy percent of its paid employers hire within a week of posting a job.

Much of the growth of these startups has been organic – that is, they have made a name by word of mouth or greater visibility on the internet. Some have run limited ad campaigns.

They have also benefited from the retail boom, which has created more demand for delivery boys and stewards.

The entrepreneurs behind these startups say the gap between jobseekers and online opportunities has declined primarily because of the smartphone revolution and a constant increase in internet access.

“The presence of so many startups in the space is a validation of what we started. But it is a huge market, and there is plenty of room. We expect a few more years before the smartphone revolution digs further deep and touches 100 percent customer base in India,” says Vir.

Plans like free wi-fi at 400 railway stations, and the launch of Reliance Jio telecom that promises a 4G network all over India and low data tariff could make that happen sooner rather than later.

This post Amid an unemployment crisis, meet the startups throwing a lifeline to millions of Indians appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/millions-of-blue-collar-jobs-go-online
via IFTTT