India – a young country- has a large number of unemployed youth; those in rural and remote areas find hard to get suitable employment due to lack of access to employment opportunities and guidance in their job search.
FirstJob aims to prepare the young job seekers in their quest for suitable employment and connect them with potential employers. FirstJob platform connecting employers with young job seekers, is built on mobile Android platform; with growing popularity of economically priced smartphones and simultaneous growth in 3G/4G coverage, FirstJob empowers millions of job seekers to get the best job they deserve.
Founded in 2001, First Job is an established training, recruitment and staffing company. With offices in Mumbai and Delhi, the company currently has over 200 people on its payroll with annual revenues of over Rs 100 million. It has trained and /or placed over 100,000 young people since inception in various sectors like BPO/ KPO, telecom and banking/insurance. First Job is a product of Synergy RMS Pvt. Ltd. which is a part of Singapore based Quest on the FRONTIER Group.
Team BWDisrupt interacts with Arvind Singh, CEO, First Job and spoke to him
Brief us about your venture. When did you join the business? What have you brought to the table?We have unique situation in India; while employers complain they are not able to find people for the open roles, there are millions of educated unemployed youth outside the urban areas. FirstJob is a unique platform that leverages 4G connectivity (yes, Jio and other telcos will take 4G connectivity nationwide at very affordable rates) and smart phones (with below Rs 5000 prices, smart phone sales are rocketing). Most of our youth, especially in smaller towns and rural areas access internet thru smart phones.
FirstJob has created a platform that connect employers wanting to hire in bulk for entry level/ front line roles with young job seekers in the smaller towns and rural areas. Here, we are talking of millions of jobs mainly in services sector for graduates/ post graduates and also, for 12+ with some vocational skills. And through our FirstJob Android based application, we provide guidance and hand holding to the rural job seekers; most of them have no one among their family and friends to help them.
What makes this particular concept different? Are there competitors? If yes, how do you stand out?For entry level jobs, resumes are not very useful and most employers want to meet the candidates. Job seekers from rural and remote areas are reluctant to travel far for the initial rounds of interviews. As a result, the organizations spend a lot of time and money arranging such face to face sessions.
FirstJob leverages 4G connectivity and smart phones to overcome the logistics challenges and thus, enables the employers to interview the candidates in an asynchronous manner (like whatsapp; the employer sends the link to an interview and the candidate can complete at their convenience within stipulated time). Thus, FirstJob makes bulk “hiring easier, faster and cheaper” for the employers; it also helps a candidate “Get a Job. Anytime. Anywhere”.
FirstJob is a unique service with no established competitor. We have recently partnered with National Career Service under Ministry of Labor and Employment to help 37 million registered job seekers.
Since inception, give us a sense of the value of business done by your venture? What is the current turnover?We are at an early stage. Recent launch of Jio and the subsequent reduction of 4G tariffs by other telcos will provide us a great boost.
What is the revenue model?This is a social business as we seek the job seekers get the best job they deserve. Hence, our service is free the job seekers. We generate revenues from the corporate employers who use the platform on the basis of usage. In addition, we generate advertising revenue by promoting suitable and related products to our audience.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting with the innovation? How is this going to affect them?We are a young country. Hundreds of millions of young Indians are/ will be seeking suitable jobs; they will be the primary beneficiaries as they can guidance and access to jobs. So, we help them “Get a Job. Anytime. Anywhere”.
Large employers will also benefit. FirstJob streamlines their hiring process and thus, makes bulk hiring “easier, faster and cheaper”.
What is the potential of growth? Indian industry, mainly in the services sector needs millions of entry level/ front line staff. These roles have over 50% attrition rates. As a result, hiring front line sales, service and operations staff is a huge challenge. This gives us a huge scope to grow. Our aim to help one hundred thousand people find jobs every year; even if we earn Rs 1000 for each case, this means revenues in excess of hundreds of millions.
Where did the initial capital for the innovation come? What returns does it have? We bootstrapped and funded the idea through own resources.
What is the strength of the organization and the scale of operations?We have a core team in place and are in the process of scaling up; we plan to have over 100 staff within 18 months.
Give us a brief background of what you were doing before starting the venture.We operate a recruitment, staffing and training company since 2001. In recent times, we found our large clients wanted to but were struggling to hire candidates from the smaller towns and rural areas. Most businesses needed a large workforce at a salary level that was no longer an aspirational role. So, the businesses wanted to hire good candidates from smaller towns but to operational and logistics challenges, were fining hard and expensive. This is where we saw an opportunity and in anticipation of 4G launch by Jio & others and the rise of attractively priced Smartphones, we started developing FirstJob.
Future plansFirst, we will build scale in India. Second, we will expand to other large geographies like Indonesia that have similar issues. Third, we will leverage the information we capture re: millions of young people to offer them additional services.
Our focus is to leverage new technologies to help rural and suburban India. Another initiative in this context is Mobital- that provides quality modern healthcare in rural areas at affordable prices. We piloted Mobital in Punjab since May 2015 and based upon the spectacular results we have seen, we plan to roll out 1000 units within 7-10 years in India and abroad.
Have you received any funding so far? Are you looking for funds? If yes how do you look to allocate the funds? No, we have been self funded. Yes, we are looking for funding by year end / early 2017. The funds raised will be used to scale up operations and invest in product / technology upgrade and invest in branding.
What challenges did you face when you were starting out?It took us a while to crystallize the idea and get market feedback. While we had some fuzzy ideas, things only became clearer once we built a working prototype and tested the working concept with target clients. Their positive response gave us the confidence to go ahead.
