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 KicksStartJobs.

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.

Reaching job seekers

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