Key Challenges In Creating A Job Portal For The Informal Sector Workers In India

By Author: Amit Singh
Total Articles: 25
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The grey economy can be defined in a broad sense as referring to the portion of the commercial activity that is either unregulated or insufficiently regulated by the state. In this sense, the blue collar economic activities are those productive activities that are unrecorded – or insufficiently accounted for – in a country’s national income account.
However, defining the unemployed economy in a more specific and more useful manner is complicated by the lack of unanimity regarding those activities deemed informal.

These unregistered firms represent a sizeable portion of the global economy. Every month, a million Indians become age-eligible to join the workforce, but the growth in jobs has not kept pace with the rising numbers of aspirants. It gives rise to unemployment, despite India supposedly being one of the brighter spots in a slowing global economy. Many people lose their jobs for their employers being resistant to change to make them a permanent employee from temporary.

The situation gets worsens with slow industrial growth and lack of successful execution of unemployment programs. ...
... Traditionally, the labour-intensive industries are trying to mechanise their operation but the need of the hour requires digital solutions as well to pace up the speed. But they often face some challenges which restrict them from coming up with such ventures. Some of them are:

ACCESS TO THE INTERNET: If under Modi’s Government, every citizen could get access to the internet, it would get much easier to source out jobs for these people. Free wifi and low-rate internet plans would contribute the most in making India a better India. People at the bottom of the pyramid can attain education on so many aspects if they are given access to the internet. To fasten the process, Just Jobs has made registration for workers easy, without an internet access.

NO HIGH REVENUES: In a world like today’s no one wants to engage in something with fewer revenues or basically do the social service for the society without thinking about their own benefits. It gets very difficult to expect such portals where they do not categorize “people as a product”. One like Just Jobs is on a quest to transform the informal economy.

BUDGET: It takes a healthy budget to develop such big job portal solution. Becoming a top brand in the niche sector gets far more expensive on the financial front. The real expense is its sales and marketing. One of the idiosyncrasies of people of India is they only share what is favourable or useful to them.

MAINTENANCE: Making a website or portal is one thing, but maintaining it is another. Many people would run away if they do not see fruitful results in the beginning itself. But the effective results always shows up at the end after your continuous marketing effort. Thus, to make such a portal success requires web developers, designers, managers, etc., basically a network of consultants across the globe.

KNOCK-OFFS: A successful portal is all about reliable and verified sources and resources. Providing the job seeker with unverified companies is a big knock-off. As the unemployment rate is already high in India, the last thing a job seeker or recruiter expects is fake credentials.

Creating a job portal for the unemployed economy is in itself a transforming movement, but it would have the least impact if the people coming under this category do not have access to basic resources to make things work. An online portal called Just Jobs came up with a solution which gets rid of most of the key challenges that we discussed above.