Aasaanjobs aims to help these 47 million jobless in India, raises $5m

Photo credit: Premnath Thirumalaisamy

If all of India’s unemployed lived together in one country, its population would be more than Spain’s. That’s the scale of joblessness in India. At the last count in 2014, there were 47 million unemployed in the country. And a large chunk of them are young people in rural India who have had a basic education and do not want to work in farms like their parents and grandparents.

Aasaanjobs is trying to do something about that. It’s an online marketplace for entry-level and blue collar jobs – a largely unorganized space which runs into the millions in India. The Mumbai-based startup helps job-seekers, especially the multitude of migrants flowing into cities, find what’s available more efficiently. It helps candidates create profiles and uses match-making algorithms to connect them with potential recruiters.

Today Aasaanjobs announced US$5 million in series A funding from Aspada Advisors, IDG Ventures, and Inventus Capital. This was a follow-up from a seed round last month when it raised US$1.5 million from IDG Ventures and Inventus Capital.

Dinesh Goel, CEO of Aasaanjobs, says, “The company will use the funds to automate its online recruitment marketplace and expand to new cities. The company will set up operations in Pune and Delhi in the first quarter and Bangalore in the second quarter of 2016.”

Aasaanjobs hopes its HR-in-the-cloud tech solutions will be a differentiator. It operates in multiple languages and also has a WAP (wireless application protocol) website to cater to feature phone users. “Selfie interviews” and chat are other useful features.

“The unstructured nature of recruitment as a space means there is an opportunity for disruption,” says Kartik Srivatsa, managing partner of Aspada Advisors.

For recruiters, Aasaanjobs offers verification of candidates and flexible options to suit their requirements – such as the hiring of workers on temporary basis.

Founders of Aasaanjobs- (L-R) Gaurav Toshniwal, Dinesh Goel, and Kunal Jadhav

IIT Bombay alumni founded the startup in 2014. A big player in this space is Babajob, founded in 2007, which claims to have 5 million registered job-seekers. It was the first of its kind and last year, it raised US$10 million in series B funding from Australia’s SEEK, a global online employment marketplace.

The government of India too runs a jobs portal called National Career Service. Last week, the labor ministry signed pacts with Uber, Quikr, Monster, Tech Mahindra, Babajobs, India Staffing Federation (ISF), Buzzmatic Ventures, and GoldFish to widen the scope and scale of the NCS project.

See: Mobile internet zooming in India: 371 million users by June