Rozgar for everyone

Apna has over five million women accessing its platform

It's been a difficult two years for everyone, especially as far as getting a job and hanging onto it was concerned. And while white-collar employees could employ the services of a well-equipped social media app like LinkedIn, the blue-collar employee was often left out in the cold. Women, too, according to an Oxfam report in April 2021, lost more than 64 million jobs globally.

Amidst the gloom, a fortunate development in India was the emergence of vernacular job search apps, which have been helping both, blue-collar employees and women, find jobs. Jobs and networking platform Apna is available in 10 languages and say that cities such as Bhilai and Jabalpur have high numbers of people who prefer vernacular interfaces. It now has almost 22 million users. "We offer verified jobs across a multitude of categories, and are now helping potential job searchers take upskilling courses as well," says Roshan Agarwal, head-sales and operations, Apna.co.

Nilesh Dungarwal and Roshan Agarwal

Apna saw a 430 per cent rise in their female users in the last year, and now has five million women accessing its platform. "The number of categories are wide - in both traditional roles like telecallers and front office, and non-traditional roles such as delivery partners and lab technicians. We think this variety has helped our female users. Almost 20 per cent of these job interactions are converting into employment," Agarwal adds.

During the pandemic, a nurse, Jyoti S, found a job through the Apna app in less than 24 hours after joining the platform. She was appointed in a reputed hospital, working with COVID-19 patients. Jyoti also networked through the apps and set up a placement agency with a fellow job seeker she met on the app. Agarwal says that the plan for 2022 is to expand from the existing 48 cities to 150.

WorkIndia, which was launched in 2015, is the largest online platform for the blue-collar workforce. Available in 12 regional languages, the app, which covers about 85 per cent of spoken dialects in India, is a fully automated platform that enables geo-tagged, dynamic, algorithm-based hiring that requires minimum or no human intervention. It offers a unique four-step candidate process that helps employers meet the most suitable employees. It also has a fraudulent job engine, which weeds out the fraud job entries as well. Of the 21 million registered job seekers, 3.5 million are monthly active users.

Nilesh Dungarwal, co-founder, WorkIndia, says that the idea came to them when they realised what a ruckus job brokers were creating. "For a blue-collar employee, even losing R500 a day could be life-changing. We wanted to make it easy for them," he says. His app is only 10mb in size, so that it can be downloaded easily on even the simplest of devices. "On our app, they can be connected to the employer in 10 minutes.

The job will be based on their location, hence saving them travel money." WorkIndia has also seen an increase of 35 per cent in its women users as well, many of whom are getting jobs as receptionists, office administrators, beauticians and cooks. "Almost 15 per cent of our users get a job in a month. In the past year, we've managed to help one million candidates get a job, and the aim for the next three years is to reduce the time period for that million into a month."

430
Percentage rise in female users on Apna app in the last one year