The story of babajobs - Episode I

Interview with TED Fellow, Sean Blagsvedt, founder & CEO babajobs.com - Episode I

Do you remember how you hired your household help, cook, driver or a baby sitter? For most of us the experience could be almost the same. We ask our neighbors to suggest one; we put in a word to the apartment watchman; we inform our friends in the city and seek their advice. We could have also contacted an agency which provides such services.

Well, could you ever really say, that you are a competitive employer or that you truly verified their credentials and their salary claims? Do you even know the actual going price for the job that you are offering, in your locality?

If you’re an employer from a software company searching for employees, then there are comfortable answers to these questions. But what about the informal sector of domestic help and services? Well there is babajobs.com.

Babajobs is a job board for all prospective informal sector employees looking for jobs and employers who are seeking such services. The man behind this fantastic idea is Sean Blagsvedt.

When I got to know that I have to interview him, I was pretty curious to find out how this model works. I was curious, how and why Sean, an American by birth, got to start this venture in India.

Sean has an illustrious career and an infectious spirit. He is someone who has applied a proven solution to an ignored segment and is truly making a change.

He says technology's primary principle should be to elevate the standards, the standards of living. With over 3,00,000 jobs advertised and over 50000 seekers registered, all with in 1 year in business, he can say with pride, he is on track to accomplish the mission.

Sean was recently selected as a TED follow, and very agreeably, joined the list of great visionaries and thought leaders of our age. It was interesting to listen to him speak about this venture. Following are the excerpts from the interview. I intend publishing them in 2 episodes:

Babajobs had its origins with your idea of linkedin for informal sector of employees. Who heard about this first and what was the reaction? How did you assemble the team?

Babajobs started with an idea when I was working with Microsoft. As part of the team that I worked for, we were looking at how Technology can be utilized in an effective fashion for social issues. Thats when we came across a paper based on the research of 3500 families in Rajasthan. The paper analyses how families get in and out of poverty. The drive to get a family out of poverty came with a Job. Usually the poor people get their jobs by some reference. It is an informal social networking. I looked at a possible solution for this through technology. The solution meant digitizing of all jobs, digitizing the job seekers information and this solution will make finding a job much easier. And then I kept looking for the like minded people who will be able to validate the idea, contribute on execution and so on.

How long did it take for you to bring the idea into fruition?

Almost 3 years.

Why in India?

Because I was already living in India and I liked living here. The market was existing already - the target segment - people not extensively educated and looking for a better paying job in the vicinity is definitely big here. There was a need and I thought I had a possible solution. And India was the hub where developing a software solution is much easier. In the United States which is the other place I could have done this, this kind of site would be used by the immigrants. However the numbers is nowhere near India.

It is good to know that you like being here. How are you managing this language diversity? Particularly your target segment is full of people from different linguistic background.

We are having multilingual postings already. We support Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi. But when we see people who are using mobile, looking at SMS and so on the need to give in other languages is usually minimal. Those who anyway come to a mentor for looking at vacancies anyway will get the details translated to them by the mentor. So again the need is minimal. What is a definite plus is to have a voice over portal and not simply a call center that we currently have. We are working on that portal and will soon be ready.

Whenever we look at hiring someone who is going to be at home, may be in our absence too, security is a big concern. How are you able to gain the confidence of employers?

We offer different services for this. These offers are of course based on the employer's requirement. For those job seekers who come to us, either to our office or to our mentors, we look at a set of documents, scan them, take a photo and update the profile. We encourage putting up lot of references. These references will in fact enable them to get better pay. Apart from the references, for specific jobs like taking care of children, if the employers ask, we also do additional verification. However for jobs, for example the jobs in retail industry during this festival period, employers dont look at verification with so much importance.

We will continue with Sean in the next episode...