Babajob has been scaling up across India to reach more low-income job seekers and advance our mission of “Better Jobs for Everyone.” We are focused on building the best possible platform for the informal and entry-level formal sectors, bringing the right job opportunities to job seekers. Over the past few years, we have built an offline channel that allows job seekers to register, find and apply to jobs, all without the internet. While internet penetration is rapidly increasing in India, many people at the BoP are still left out. We will do everything we can to break this trend and are committed to working with partners who are doing the same. But we still recognize that low-income job seekers may not have access to the internet for some time still, so we built an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, further described later in this application. In order to better serve our job seekers better and develop new innovations to provide them the best possible service, we have begun building a robust research program called BabaLab. This includes internal Babajob research, where we speak to our users to understand what we can improve, as well as involving external partners interested in our target demographic. We work with researchers from a host of different renowned institutions on a range of different projects, all with an eye to enhancing our benefits for job seekers and creating a better match with relevant jobs. Additionally, we have engaged in a variety of partnerships in order to reach new groups of job seekers. We are working with a host of different players in the Indian skilling ecosystem to see how best we can add value and contribute to the government’s skilling mission. So far, we have built a platform that allows skilling institutes to mass upload their trained students to Babajob, creates a unique account for each of the student, and provides them access to information about relevant jobs, completely for free. The training institutes also get data on their students and their post-graduation journey. With a few close partners, we are also working on how we can give prospective students information about the right training opportunities for them. We are also working on improving our services for marginalized groups in the labor force, specifically economic migrants, women, and persons with disabilities. We are building innovations for each of these groups in order to offer them a better platform to find job opportunities and overcome traditional barriers they face when entering the workforce.
Babajob currently has over 6.1 million job seekers registered across more than 600 cities and villages in every state and union territory of India. Every month, job seekers make over 550,000 applications to jobs in 26 different categories, completely for free. The average salary offered for jobs on our site is about INR 9,657.64, or approximately USD 144.99 (66.61 INR: 1 USD) per month. The current gender split for job seekers is about 25% women to 75% men, though we are working internally along with several external researchers on how to create a more gender-inclusive platform. On the other side of the equation, we have over 370,000 employers, who have posted more than 5.4 million job opportunities on Babajob. The gender split of these employers is approximately 30% women to 70% men. Employers come to Babajob for similar reasons to job seekers: without Babajob finding qualified candidates and making the right match is very difficult to do in the informal sector. This is particularly true for small to medium enterprises (SMEs: businesses usually employing 10 people or less), who generally can’t afford the HR infrastructure operated by larger enterprises. SMEs make up our largest category of employers, followed by households. At Babajob, we are trying to reduce the difficulties these smaller hirers face when looking for the right employee.
While we have conducted several studies and captured a variety of user success stories, we cannot publicly share these results due to the competitive nature of our field.