Coronavirus: This duo is helping those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic return to work
Suyash Jain and Rajat Agarwal created a Google form to accumulate the details of job seekers, and provide the data to various employers. They aim to bridge the gap that divides these two sections of the job marketplace.
With the coronavirus pandemic situation weighing down on the economy, thousands of people have lost their jobs due to the lockdowns imposed to curb the health crisis. Many companies working in the retail and food businesses, along with those associated with event management firms such as those employed in the Indian wedding industry, have taken a big hit in this period.
However, despite the worsening situation, some companies are still hiring, especially in the domains of ecommerce, pharma, food companies, online education, and gaming.
Co-founders: Suyash Jain and Rajat Agarwal
Many people came forward to help the unemployed through WhatsApp groups, Facebook, and Telegram groups to create awareness about vacancies in these tough times. It was at that moment that it struck Suyash Jain that “great challenges also bring great opportunities.”
A B2B growth manager at , Suyash, along with his growth specialist colleague, Rajat Agarwal, started the social initiative COVID-19 Free Jobs Forum to help job seekers who were laid off in times of the pandemic.
“On April 27, I read a news article titled ‘A B2B Company lays off 3,000 Contract Workers’ according to which delivery executives and field sales team were laid off,” says Suyash. “This hit home as I had faced challenges while hiring a field sales team as these are not available easily over various job portals like Naukri.com, Shine.com, Monster India, LinkedIn, etc,” Suyash, who calls himself a ‘hustler’, tells SocialStory.
Rising to the occasion
The duo came to understand the major gap between the candidate and the employer, and the difficulties in finding useful leads. Many a time, the leads were quite random and the employer would find it hard to find a suitable candidate after skimming through a number of CVs.
“On the very same day, I created a Google form titled ‘Register yourself for Job Opportunities’ which consisted of necessary information like name, number, mail Id, the field of job, city, last company name, last salary, and designation, and posted it on a Facebook group,” says Suyash.
“My major objective, which I thought at that time, was to use this database while planning to expand feet-on-street sales team in Bijnis,” he adds.
Simplifying the job marketplace model
The Google form got good responses in less than 24 hours with more than 100+ job seekers at the time. The duo shared the details with the corporates who were looking out for new employees, thus bridging the gap between the two divides.
They then started a social initiative to help job seekers on scale and launched the forum from the point of view of HRs, while also sharing it on their profile in a post.
In addition, they also started commenting on various LinkedIn posts when people got laid off, fired or were looking for a new job opportunity.
“The main value proposition we are giving to HR teams is that they can filter out candidates according to the requirement without checking the CVs one by one,” says Suyash. “We are also providing free access to the Live Database of Form Responses (consisting of job seekers details) through which, on a daily basis, we get more than 60+ new responses.”
If you’ve lost your job during the pandemic, you can click here for more details or click here to register.
Impact and statistics
A month into its foundation, the forum got registrations from more than 8,000+ job seekers with about 400+ active HRs from top companies actively using the database. Currently, they shave 10,000+ job seekers and 500+ employers who are registered on their platform.
“We recently created a live online jobs and internship sheet as well to help job seekers so that they can view the most recent job openings (350+ recent job listings), and can apply directly. Within four days of its launch, we had traffic of 1,500 unique users using it,” says Suyash.
The team is also collecting free useful resources and sharing them with job seekers so that they can upskill themselves and learn relevant and beneficial courses until they get a job.
The forum received a lot of positive responses on social media, which according to them is what keeps them going.
When asked about what’s next in their action plan, Suyash replies, “We are planning to take it on a higher scale by launching a website for the same. However, we do not have any plans to monetise this initiative as we did it to help people as well to understand our learnings by building a simplified job marketplace.”
They are also collaborating with another platform – Corona Tracker – which aims to help out people during the pandemic and has a similar objective of reaching out to more job seekers and employers.
In addition to that, they are planning to get mentors and trainers who can help the job seekers out at no fees or at a minimal cost.
Edited by Kanishk Singh