LinkedIn too frustrating? These startups help Indians get jobs

Photo credit: Pixabay.

In India, it can be hard to find a job after university. Sounds familiar, right? Jobs in general are scarce right now and have been for almost a decade. Here’s the thing, though – there are jobs in India, but it’s a matter of finding workers to fill them. You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem in the world’s second most populated country in the world. You’d be surprised.

“There’s more people going to college, and as people keep studying, unemployability has gone from 4 percent to 32 percent,” says Harpreet Singh Grover, co-founder of CoCubes. The same goes for engineering students. He explains that it’s not that jobs aren’t available, just that students might not have the right skills to get them. It’s skills, not only a degree, that land postgraduate students jobs.

India has an outdated education system where useful skills aren’t taught.

Condtions like those mean that the job hiring space is wide open for employment startups like Harpreet’s assessment and hiring site CoCubes and speed-hiring portal Hiree, founded by Manjunath Talwar and Abhijit Khasnis.

Harpreet co-founded Gurgaon-based CoCubes with Vibhore Goyal in 2007 to address what he saw as a core problem: India has an outdated education system where useful skills aren’t taught. CoCubes offers an assessment that specifically tests for job skills.

Photo credit: Pixabay.

“If a candidate is looking for a job, and you’re just out of college, it’s been two to three months and no companies came to the college, you say: hey, help me with the job,” explains Harpreet. “At the end [of the test], we tell you what you’re good at, what you’re okay at, and what you’re bad at.”

The assessment comes with a login, which test-takers can use to access jobs through CoCubes. If a job shows a match with an applicant’s skills – tangible skills like programming, coding, and English – he or she can apply.

When you’re looking for someone with zero to three, zero to four years’ experience, that’s where we step in.

Unlike a job aptitude test, which helps someone discover a career path, his company solves a more immediate problem, helping people find jobs.

“There are two problems that need to be solved: the problem of discovery, which is making candidates and employers meet, which was solved by job boards a long way back; and job-matching,” says Harpreet.

Sites like LinkedIn and Monster can pick up the job discovery problem, he adds, but they don’t tell employers how effective a hiree will be at a job. “LinkedIn works for jobs where you have 10 years of experience,” he says. “When you’re looking for someone with zero to three, zero to four years’ experience, that’s where we step in.”

A quicker way to employment

From classroom to office