Anupam Sinhal's website Nanojobs provides employment opportunities for plumbers, drivers and cooks and all those who do odd jobs. Launched in April, the site today handles thousands of requests every day
When Anupam Sinhal launched Nanojobs, he simply wanted to provide a space for those who did odd-jobs for a living, so that they could find more employment opportunities. Six months later, he has over five lakh plumbers, electricians, drivers, security guards and many others registered on the site, thousands of Mumbaiites are logging on every day to hire the services of these men and women.
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Anupam Sinhal’s (centre) Nanojobs.com helps provide employment opportunities to people who do odd jobs
Take the case of Chetan Khanna, owner of MS Hydrosolutions, Kandivli, who runs a plumbing business. Recently when he advertised for plumbers in newspapers, he got tired of receiving calls from plumbers all over Mumbai. It was then when he came to know about Nanojobs through a friend. He registered on the portal and requested for plumbers only from the Kandivli area. Within 24 hours there was a queue at Khanna’s office and by the end of the week he had hired eight of them for his business.
Less than six months after it was launched, nanojobs.com now has a database of 5,00,000 job seekers from over a dozen different categories. And amazingly 18,000 people have secured jobs for themselves through this portal.
So how does one get hold of an electrician or a babysitter through the website? And how do potential employees, mostly the urban poor, enroll on the site?
The services are provided in a simple manner. “A job seeker needs to give us a missed call on a toll-free number. He or she will soon receive a call from the executives of Nanojobs. These executives then note down the details of the candidate’s area of expertise and geographical location and create a curriculum vitae (CV) that is then screened on the portal. Employers can go through the CVs and shortlist candidates according to their requirements,” says Anupam Sinhal, Managing Director, Nanojobs.
This thought of providing a platform for people who did odd jobs first came to Sinhal in 2008 when the country and indeed most of the world faced an economic recession. “Several people lost their jobs. And while the educated middle-class could find new jobs through various job portals, no one quite had job offers for those who earned their wage daily. Hence I took an initiative to build a portal that would screen profiles of such people and provide them employment opportunities. I started working on this plan from 2009 and in April 2013 my portal Nanojobs was born,” explains the 27-year-old entrepreneur.
The success of any such portal of course depends on whether those who need such services are using the site and are willing to pay the website for using the services. This is how it works: a potential employer has to login to the portal and fill in all requisites. One needs to mention a specific search criteria i.e.
the type of worker he is looking for and the location that he prefers. Membership packages range between R500 to R80,000 depending on the package. A person seeking a package of R500 gets 10 credit points where he can search up to 10 employees while the expensive packages, usually taken by large corporate houses, have unlimited credit points. But what about a one-time user? In case a homemaker needs to search for a baby sitter she has the option of putting through a call to the portal’s office and listing her requirements. But in this case they will charge the equivalent of the employee’s one month’s salary from the employer.
“Our aim is to strengthen our society economically. This is just a small initiative from my end,”u00a0concludes Sinhal.u00a0
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