A 'LinkedIn' for the unorganised sector
Babajob's aim is to connect employers with job seekers who might be looking for well-paying jobs which are also close to their homes.
While I was working with team Babajob, our mission was to maximise the reach for Babajob into the seeker communities. To this effect, we employed 3 mediums:
1. The Website
2. A Windows 8 App
3. Print collateral, to complement Babajob's missed call campaign
Babajob is featured in the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum as a permanent exhibit, part of the Design for the 99% collection.
The Website • babajob.com
The babajob website was designed to cater mainly to the employers. Employers specify what they’re looking for alongwith their location. The UI tells them the average salary being offered to the job profile they’re posting. Once the job is posted, relevant job seekers receive a message with the name and phone number of the employer, and call up the employer.
A Windows 8 App
The Babajob app was one of the few native apps to be shipped with the new Win8 PCs to be sold in the market in India. The Windows8 app for babajob performed the same tasks as the web interface, only in the Windows 8 style.
Missed Calls as a means to maximising reach to the job seekers
Babajob's propagation was not as rapid as one would expect, mainly due to the maximum population of job seekers still dependant on basic phones with no internet access, to communicate. Due to this constraint, we were forced to innovate in our methods to maximise reach to the job seekers.
One of the methods for this that we zero'd down to and employed, was to connect through small 'nukkad' shops. Nukkad shops are found at almost every corner of migrant and other labour settlements and they sell cigarettes, pan, soap and other daily supplies. Babajob converted a lot of them into 'Agents', who would then wither hand-hold the job seekers into registering with babajob or then register these seekers themselves.
For the success of this experiment, the nukkad shopkeepers and the job seekers both needed to be educated about how Babajob works and hence we prepared information booklets for them, walking them through the registration and job seeking process.
The Nukkad Agent Information Brochure
Inside the Agent Information brochure, information and instructions about babajob and the process of registration
Once the agents were to inform job seekers about Babajob, inform them of the basics, and give them a minimum 'training' of how to navigate Babajob, they would also then leave them with a seeker information handout (soochna patra) to take back with them.
Front and back of the handout for the job seeker, with all the information and instructions
A poster as a call to register through a missed-call
I created a poster which we put up in multiple locations across Bangalore. This poster informed the job seekers upfront about all the jobs available on babajob, salaries they could expect and the babajob number which they could give a missed call to
An ATM Card Jacket + Pocket Calendar + Instructions to Register with Babajob
One other idea that I experimented with was to create an ATM card jacket.
We observed that most of the workers have a bank account which accompanied an ATM card that they were very particular about preserving in the jacket provided by the bank. However, the paper jacket provided by the bank was in a bad condition because it was in a flimsy condition. Therefore, we experimented with making a replacement jacket which would triple up as an instructions manual for registrations as well as a pocket calendar. The idea was well-received by the job seekers.
