Aasaanjobs Makes it ‘Easy’ to Land a J.O.B.

It’s a startup aiming to redefine and organize the market for entry level and blue collar jobs, which often, let’s face it, is unregulated with no guaranteed way to know the people we hire are reliable and has no standard approach for job seekers to find employment in.

Aasaanjobs wants to change all this. We speak to Dinesh Goel, cofounder and CEO of Aasaanjobs

Why did you decided to found this venture?

I’m a chemical engineer from IIT-Bombay and started working with a multinational bank after graduated in 2012. Almost a year later, I realized that my house maid was worried about her only son’s job. A watchman at his housing society would ask me about job opportunities for him. These incidences made me realize that there was a need of a network for blue collar jobs. In November 2014, my friends, Guarav Toshniwal, Kunal Jadhav and I teamed up to launch a unique recruitment platform for the blue collar class, aasaanjobs.com and we are now a team of 150 people.

Share with us what’s special about this venture and how it’s different from its competitors?

Aasaanjobs is an online marketplace for entry-level and blue collar jobs. It provides a platform for employers and job seekers to interact. The company’s two-way matchmaking algorithm filters its database so that we connect only candidates whose profiles and job expectations match client requirements. This makes the entire process quick, effective and convenient for both job seekers and recruiters.

Aasaanjobs’ USP is its innovative technology-backed solutions that solve the problem of recruitment in a largely unstructured segment in a number of ways. It offers a multilingual website as well as a WAP website to engage with candidates still using feature phones.

How did you manage to fund this idea?

In 2015, Aasaanjobs raised a seed round of $1.5Mn lead by Inventus Capital and IDG. In 2016, we raised $5Mn in Series A lead by Inventus Capital, IDG and Aspada Advisors.

What are/what will be your monetization paths?

Employers purchase interview credits, wherein they pay a credit only for a valid interview - where the candidate matches the skill requirements according to the job posting. Manpower agencies too get incentivized based on the number of relevant candidates they send. They receive a fixed percentage of the money transacted per interview.

Tell us how the business has grown so far

We have seen excellent traction in our model from various types of clients since last year. We have over 7,000 clients in our system that we have catered to in the last two and a half years, ranging from startups and SMEs to big corporates.

Since last year, we have offered a gamut of HR services like:

- Pre-paid Plans
- Recruitment process outsourcing solutions
- Contract staffing solutions
- Payroll management solutions
- Complete labour and compliance audit solutions

What marketing strategies and plans are in place to grow the business?

It’s a difficult market to crack. On the employer side, our focus is to build a loyal community of HR folks, and that, we think, will not only generate business opportunities but also help in spreading Aasaanjobs brand reputation among potential employers.

We have built a very large community on the job seeker side and it’s just about time the community should start building more via organic user acquisition, referral and word of mouth advertising across various geographies.
That said, we focus very heavily on online marketing and using offline marketing as a mode to push our digital efforts.

What is the market size and opportunity?

We are looking at a $10Bn market size in India, looking at the entry to mid level segment alone. There are only few players in the market, and with the recent IPOs of Quess Corp and TeamLease, we think the market opportunity is massive. There is a massive scope for organizing the market, since only 10% of the market is currently organized.

Any challenges faced setting up? Anything unique to your situation?

The major challenge initially came from shedding that image of being just another manpower agency. Once job seekers were convinced, looking at the various technological and service offerings, it became a little easier to gain traction. The other challenge was liaising with partners and agencies, while fulfilling client requirements, some of which were so particular as to include a particular Android version in the phones of candidates!

Share with us some best and worst memories while running the business

Best - One of our job seekers, Irfan, came back just to thank us for helping him. He said we have changed his life and made it better. Irfan is a bike enthusiast who loves to ride bikes, earlier he used to work in a house keeping department and wanted to opt for a job that he would also enjoy. We offered him a delivery boy job which was a good option for him as he loves to ride bike. Now he earns much more than what he used to in his earlier job and more important he likes what work he is doing.

Worst - Every company faces ups and downs but one should focus on the positive side and let go the negativity. This is what we think perhaps there were some scenarios where our company faced instability. However, ever low memory is worst for us.