The story of babajobs - Episode II

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

We continue our interview with Sean on babajobs, his business model, partners and more…

I get your point. How do you plan to expand your partner network? Have you thought about partnering with existing networks like Bangalore One for getting mentors?

We are definitely looking at partners. We are talking to a lot of telcos, handset providers and also MFIs (Micro Financing Institutions). Telcos and handset providers are different kind of partners, whereas we look at MFIs for giving us the mentors and also spread the word in the job seeker world. A lot of job seekers come through them. And a person who has taken a MFI loan automatically becomes a job seeker with trustworthy credentials.

We have already partnered with IDEA and Reliance and partnerships with other companies are in the anvil. We are looking at them to provide job alerts as a value added service.

Handset makers can play a different role as partners. They can provide an application that will run in their handset and enable the mobile owners to search for better paying jobs more easily. You know, Nokia offers an application to farmers that will alert the farmers on the price for the produce in the nearby markets. Such applications make a handset more attractive . Also Handset makers are looking at this segment now, because the existing segment will saturate sometime soon and they need to have a new pipeline.

I see that you are trying to work with every link in your distribution chain. Does make sense. What are your key learning in this venture? How did you learn and how have you changed?

Two things: First and foremost - Look at the market. Keep focusing on the market. Sell what they want and not what you think they want. The example here - We initially overestimated the impact of social networking on getting a job. So we created babalife and babajobs. We analyzed and found that most of the jobs were negotiated based on the price rather than on the social network. We took a sample of 130 jobs and found that they have got 20.1% better pay and without any social network background. So we are kind of retiring babalife. We are pulling resources from babalife and putting more resources on to babajobs.

The second key learning is - Our good intention cannot screw up the system. Initially we did not show the current salary of the job seeker in the search results. We thought that the employer will shortlist on lowest salary only and not consider other factors. But what we found was that employers called up job seekers and offered them less salary than what the job seekers were getting already. It defeated the purpose of our venture. So we decided to show the salary.

Yes. At the end, it is a matter of price. Your team must be putting in a lot of hard work. You deserve those laurels that I see on lot of articles in every media. How are you managing to find the talent and how do you retain them?

Thank you. Actually it is not that difficult here to get good talent. Our mission motivates people. We have applicants from babajobs and the vacancies get filled easily. The prime reason is that there is a mission and accomplishing that makes them stay with us.

In these days of recession every company is seeing a downward trend in attrition, for other reasons. In your case it is different and is more sustainable too. Good luck. What’s your plan for the coming years?

Lot of partnerships. And we are looking at going international too.

Ok Sean, something out of Babajobs. What’s your favorite pastime? How are you unwinding yourself?

Yes, I have a lot of them. I work with Industrial bodies like NASSCOM. Then work on community building, connect with Americans in India. I am a very people oriented person and I keep interacting with people on different levels and on different subjects. Yes, I have pet animals too.

If given a chance to restart your life from the beginning, what will you do differently?

I think staying abroad / staying away from hometown makes one more sensitive to humanity. I would have chosen to stay abroad early in my career. It would have enabled me to start this venture even earlier.

What does being a TED fellow mean to you?

TED inspired me because of their excellent track record of amazing speakers who are there for a purpose and are extremely good at their purpose. So it means a lot to interact with those super individuals obviously to improve myself and to get motivated.

Thanks Sean for your time and interest. I will keep you posted with links of other interviews too. Good luck.

Pleasure is mine. I look forward to knowing about the other TED fellows.

Sean can be followed in twitter – http://twitter.com/babajob

His blog is - http://seanblagsvedt.blogspot.com/

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...