New app helps millions in villages find city jobs
When India went into lockdown in March, millions of migrant labourers found themselves out of work, penniless, and far from home. In the following weeks, these people hit the road en masse to return to their villages. Now, as the country starts to reopen, those millions are reluctant to go back to cities until they can be certain there's work. Nirmit Parikh says he can help.
Parikh, a 32-year-old with an MBA from Stanford, has created Apna, which he envisions as a sort of LinkedIn for non-English-speaking, non-affluent Indians. When these people move to the cities, they typically find work via small-time employment agencies or on street corners for someone to hire them on daily wages. With Apna, job seekers enter their name, age, and skills to generate a virtual "business card" that's passed out to employers in Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, with more cities on the way. "A digital business card is a confidence booster for many who've only seen their super bosses carry business cards," Parikh says. "We want to give millions of bottom-ofpyramid workers a career path."
Apna says 1.25 million people have signed up since its launch in February, and companies such as Amazon.com, BigBasket, and HDFC Bank have hired workers via the app. It's divided into dozens of sections, from low-skilled jobs such as carpentry, tailoring, and cooking, to higher-level
positions in accounting, lab work, call centres, and nursing. The app is available in Hindi and Kannada, since English isn't needed. So far, the company has no revenue, but Parikh envisions job seekers paying the equivalent of a few pennies for skills courses or English lessons, and he plans to charge companies for arranging interviews.
Apna (ours in Hindi)
faces a growing number of rivals. The Delhi city government set up an online marketplace for job seekers, who can call prospective employers via its app. Bollywood actor Sonu Sood is backing Pravasi Rojgar (migrant employment), used by more than 500 companies in construction, health care, logistics, and a dozen other fields to recruit workers from villages. And ad firm Lowe
Lintas in July introduced Kaam Wapasi (return to work) to connect rural candidates with urban jobs. "Migrant workers aren't ready to return to cities without a sense of clarity and control," says Prateek Bhard-waj, the ad agency's chief creative officer.
The idea for Apna grew out of Parikh's experience hiring a welder a decade ago, when he got hundreds of résumés in response to an ad on a job portal. He invited about 20 people in for interviews, but only five showed up and most of those knew little about welding. "The system was broken," he says. As he began developing the idea in earnest last year, he took a job as an electrician in a factory in Ahmedabad, 300 miles north of Mumbai, where he chatted with workers on chai breaks and spent evenings talking with people in nearby slums. "I tried to look at it from the candidate's point of view," he says. A key takeaway: Lowskilled workers don't need résumés, an off-putting requirement on many job portals. Last summer he raised $3 mn from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital. "Job startups need to cater to the deep underbelly of the economy, about 250 million Indians doing non-farming," says Lightspeed partner Vaibhav Agarwal.
Parikh spent the next six months with five coders, and by December Apna was ready. Soon after the app went live, the pandemic hit and Parikh sensed that his idea was more relevant than ever. In July, he says, Apna facilitated 800,000 job interviews, and August is on track to double that. —Bloomberg