Babajob.com is a Bangalore-based start up that uses the web and mobile technology
to connect employers and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) informal sector workers
(i.e. maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) with the goal of creating a scalable,
replicable and profitable solution to combat poverty. Babajob aims to do this by
creating greater market efficiency in the informal sector through voice and web
features such as SMS, UssD, automated voice systems, and operator manned call
centres, enabling employers and job seekers to find each other.
The value that babajob offers to both its employers and job seekers is in its
ability to provide access to critical job and job seeker information through
various technology platforms. By leveraging web and mobile technology, babajob
is able to scale and engage a wider audience creating greater efficiency for
employers and having a social impact on job seekers. Employers can conveniently
browse job seeker profiles based on salary, location, languages, employment
background, skills and references. Babajob offers several fee-based services to
help in the matching and hiring of seekers.
Similarly, job seekers can discover and access multiple job opportunities based
on their preferences of location, salary, job category, etc. They have the
added-benefit of applying to nearby-jobs using their low-end mobile phones.
Because Babajob offers a scalable form of livelihood enhancement to India’s base
of pyramid users, babajob resonates strongly with India’s Telco carriers and
handset makers. Why? Babajob’s services on their networks and devices allows
companies to make credible claims that buying a better handset or additional VAS
services will lead to higher incomes and better job opportunities for their
customers. As the next 300 million India phone customers are likely to poorer
than the first 400 million customers, telcos and handset makers must enable
incomes to increase through the use of their services to maintain growth.
Babajob currently has a staff of 16, over 60,000+ customers and sends out over 1
million job alerts per month.
Babajob.com and babalife.com are a combined effort to provide the best social
networking and job site in India and worldwide. Our effort is based on two
simple ideas:
- Everyone deserves to get a better job, no matter what their
income or skill level, and
- Technology can enhance our ability to both
hire more efficiently, and better communicate with those we care about.
Most people find jobs through people they know – namely their extended social
network – and most employers – particularly when hiring employees that work in
the home - would like to hire a person who someone they trust can vouch for.
Babajob.com and babalife.com are an attempt to digitize this process to
efficiently “get the word out” and importantly provide an incentive for the
folks in between an employer and employee to connect people together.
Here's how we hope to achieve this:
First we have created the most compelling social-networking
site for everyone in India – babalife.com – including folks who
may not be interested in finding a new job or hiring anyone right.
Babalife.com is available through both the web and a rich SMS UI, combines a
blog, photo/video-sharing and social-networking site and is available in local
Indian languages. We hope you’ll be able to connect in richer ways with
the people you care about and find it fun too.
Second, on babajob.com, we aim to connect employers and
employees - especially those in the informal sector - by leveraging when possible their
social relations from babalife.com. Perhaps most interestingly, we also
provide a real incentive – in the form of mobile phone credits or a check when
monthly earnings exceed 300R (~$7) – to help others get jobs or simply be a
person who socially connects employers and employees.
Here’s an example: Let’s say Rajesh is looking for a cook. He creates a
posting on babajob.com and adds a few people he knows on babalife.com. Now
let’s assume that he ultimately decides to hire his uncle’s driver’s sister.
Assuming all these folks are on babalife.com, then both Rajesh’s uncle and his
driver, will earn 100R (~$2.5).
We also know that many of the people who might be hired through babajob may
not have access to a computer or phone, and so their accounts can be managed by
a friend, relative, NGO or even a cyber-café operator – called a mentor. Again,
whenever someone is hired, their mentor also earns 100R.
We hope that by offering the most compelling social network and a set of
cash based incentives, we can build a solution that leverages technology to
help more people get better jobs and meaningfully connect to each other. It's an experiment and in the
end, we hope it works.
The Why of Babajob and Babalife.
What inspired this project?
While at Microsoft Research India in 2005,
our CEO, Sean co-ran the Advanced
Development and Prototyping Team and worked very closely with the Technology for
Emerging Markets research group, whose aim was to study and invent new ways that
technology could be used to positively impact the social and economic
development of the world’s poorest 4 billion people. While there, a colleague Aishwarya Ratan presented a
study (http://www.pubpol.duke.edu/krishna/documents/Krishna_Rajasthan_poverty.pdf,
Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor: Who Gains, Who Loses, and Why?, ANIRUDH KRISHNA,
2003) that sought to explain why families in India
get in and out of poverty. In short, the answers were relatively simple:
- Poor families everywhere often fall into poverty when major health calamities
occur – if a father and primary income earner is a day laborer and loses a hand,
his family may often fall destitute (It should be noted that the solution to
sudden calamity found in many developed nations is also simple – insurance).
- On
the positive side, the study showed that poor families often left the poverty
trap through income diversification i.e. they got other jobs. If a farmer
started fixing tractors on the side or a young son got a better paying job in
the city, eventually that extra income really did raise the real economic status
of the family. How were these jobs obtained? Well, the employee knew
someone who knew someone.
Sean’s first thought was “Great – all they need is the
village version LinkedIn.com!” but obviously in order to make such a system
work, one has to overcome the problem that most low-income workers of the world
may not be literate, nor own a mobile phone and rarely own or have ready access
to an Internet-connected PC.
Thus, babajob and babalife are really an attempt to bridge a social
networking and job site – allowing people to hire people that someone that they
know can vouch – but importantly provide a direct financial incentive for those
people who connect people in a trustworthy manner across classes AND who would
be willing to help job seekers represent themselves online, in return for
compensation whenever such a job seeker is hired. It is an experiment – a
possible solution to provide all levels of job seekers more with job
opportunities while efficiently helping employers find suitable employees in
their social network. We don’t know if this will work, but we do
collectively believe that the idea is interesting enough, that we simply had to
quit our day jobs to give it shot.
So why then are there 2 sites, babajob.com and babalife.com?
We know this is a little confusing on first blush, but it’s our hope that
this will make more sense over time. Babajob is obviously a job site, but in
order to capture and keep the attention of everyone, we have simultaneously
built babalife.com to be the best of breed Indian social networking site. Why?
Because of a belief that in order to correctly model social relationships in a
community and keep the attention of those people that are not hiring nor need a
better job, a
system should be – or at least leverage – the communication medium of its users
(That’s why start-ups like friendster.com seek to mine the Outlook-contacts).
Also, would a teenager really want their homepage to be
http://babajob.com/princessyamini/ ? And yet,
we really want that teenager as a socially connected user of our system, because
it is quite likely that her parents may want to hire someone such as her best
friend's maid's sister.
Why do you pay people in your system, just for being socially “in between”
an employee and employer?
Given that we know that many jobs are filled through known references, we
figured it is important to get those known references working on our behalf. The
simplest and most useful incentive we could think of was money. Obviously, a
money distribution network is difficult and expensive to create and maintain and
thus, we pay in the form of mobile minutes for payments under 300R (about $6)
and for greater amounts, we pay via a State Bank of India check – which can be
cashed by any Indian with a voter registration or ration card. As mobile payment
systems become more widespread in India, we certainly plan to leverage them and
believe that these systems will hopefully enable lots of new innovative
businesses like babajob.com, once people and businesses can easily move money
using only a mobile number as an identifier.
Why do you feature maps so prominently?
In short, traffic. In any urban city in India and much of the developing
world, there is a growing middle class that is purchasing cars and motorbikes
like mad. This has caused huge congestion and commute times that routinely go
beyond 90 minutes. For those that use public transportation, the bus systems are
often incredibly slow and thus, finding employment near one’s residence is often
an acute priority. Given that India and many developing countries
often lack systems with well formed addresses, we believe that
points on a map will work better when comparing and searching
across locations than addresses. We also think it’s just cool to see all your
friends on a map and in the future, we may integrate these features with our SMS
services to enable people to update their location via SMS.
