2008 recession-hit job market gave me this business idea

Originally posted on LinkedIn

I was also one of them who suffered from recession-hit job market in 2008. Like many, it was a nightmare for me also to get a good job then. Somehow I managed to get one but my career path also started changing the course. My sentiment towards doing any job was not positive anymore. By the time 2010 came, I had already started my entrepreneurial journey. Though it was a failed one, the question which remained unanswered was "What is the real problem I am going to solve if I start something on my own?"

And finally, the day came when I got the reason to start my own journey as an entrepreneur in the true sense.

Finding and understanding the problems of recruitment

It was May 2010, when I asked myself a question "Why am I struggling to even survive?" and looked back to see my professional journey from 2007 to 2010. What I found was that I am not alone, there are lakhs of people who suffered from the recession-hit job market. Then I realized, this is what I was looking for my entrepreneurial journey. This observation gave me enough reasons to turn this into a business idea.

From then onwards, I have been on a mission to understand the recruitment ecosystem but very early realized that the problems caused by the recession were temporary. People remained unemployed or struggled to get a good job even post-recession. This finding made me more curious to dive deeper into the recruitment system.

I kept my research continued and after spending a decent amount of time, I figured it out that not just the job seekers but every stakeholder of the recruitment system, be it, recruiter, hiring manager, recruitment agency or hiring company, has some kind of problems and challenges.

At this stage, my job became more challenging because by this time I had understood that no stakeholder can remain intact from other stakeholder's action. Any solution, targeted at a selected group of stakeholders only, will not solve the problems of recruitment system as a whole and any individual stakeholder in particular. So I started working on a framework which serves all the stakeholders in their best interest possible.

People and technology-driven solution

The framework which I started working on, had two major building blocks, Use of Technology and Human Involvement in the recruitment system.

Throughout my research and concept building phase, I never denied the ever-growing use of technology into the recruitment process but I couldn't also deny that involvement of real people in the recruitment process will never fade away in near future.

Solution framework to fix the problems and challenges

After my long eight years of study, what I believe now is that recruitment is an ecosystem itself, If you focus on selected stakeholders, it'll create problems for everybody. Because I believed in this, I came up with a solution framework which covers every aspect of recruitment. Here is a 10 point based framework which can be executed to solve the existing problems and for better recruitment in the future.

-Bring all stakeholders to one unified platform

-Shift recruitment process from offline to online

-Crowdsource, process and share recruitment activity data

-Bring transparency in the recruitment process

-Let each stakeholder collaborate

-Maintain job seeker's privacy

-Discard fake and duplicate profiles of job seekers

-Discard fake jobs and employers

-Create a performance report for each stakeholder

-Give recruiters and hiring managers more authority

And that's how Humanital (Human + Capital) came into existence and I explain it as "An online recruitment and career platform, which brings all stakeholders of the recruitment industry together to its online unified platform and while it makes recruitment and selection process easier, transparent and cost-effective; it also does help in all spheres of career advancement through the sharing of knowledge, and experiences.

The first phase of Humanital has been launched on 25th April 2018 where anybody can create either a Professional Account or a Recruiter Account. If you haven't visited the website (www.humanital.com) or haven't created your account yet, please give it a try and wait till we launch our second module.

What's in the second module

I will write another post on what's included in the second module and why you should wait for it.

Meanwhile, you can share this post with your network and if you could share your personal experiences and opinions with me, that will be great. If you have any question or want to know about Humanital, please write to me at [email protected] Thank You and Have a Great Day.

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