Shaping Up the New Era of Hirings Among SMEs: Workindia

In this exclusive interview, we delve into the insightful mind of WorkIndia's CEO, uncovering the driving force behind the company's success and its impact on the job market. Discover the visionary strategies and innovative solutions that have propelled this tech start-up to the forefront of India's employment industry.

Today we have with us. Mr. Nilesh Dungarwal is the CEO and co-founder of WorkIndia, and what we are going to discuss with him is hiring and skill development, specifically hiring and skill development among MSME. Segment the trends, opportunities, and overall future road map as well.

Faiz Askari: If we can start with a brief introduction about you and your work in India, you know, our audience can.

Nilesh: Workindia Is India's largest recruitment platform. Specifically for MSA, we are the recruitment marketplace, so if there is an SMB looking to hire a candidate, they can simply visit workindia.in, post a job, and within 2 to 3 hours, they will start getting relevant calls. That's how simple it is and we focus on making the entire hiring process as simple as possible. Speed, quality, quantity—everything is basically taken care of by our platform, by our digital platform, and by our technology. So that's what we do: provide jobs and provide candidates to the MSMEs.

Faiz : According to you how are you observing hiring trends in last few quarters and how do you foresee next few quarters ahead, especially among the MSME sector in India?

Nilesh : So what we have seen is that the January, February, and March quarters were right. And the April, May, and June quarters are the strongest quarters in terms of hiring. Jan., Feb., and March are still good quarters,but the AMJ quarter is the best quarter. We see a dip in the July, August, and September quarters, which is the JAS quarter. And we see this picking up again during the quarter post-that, which is the October-November timeframe, the OND quarter. The reason why June or July is the month is not that fast because, though there are no festivals, the monsoon is there. There's less consumer demand, hence less hiring. So that's how it flows. What we also see on our platform are the MSMEs who are hired. One candidate online through the working platform has gone up from 1.1 to 1.3, so there's a 30% increase in that. So that's what we see, and we expect this trend to continue. This 1.3 will go to like 1.62 because working day, specifically as a platform, has been able to solve Problems of transparency and quality. Quantity. And speed is the largest problem, right? You want to hire quickly and not wait for a week. It was basically on the traditional platform, so that's what we see in this.

Faiz : So is there any industry segment that you focus on, or is there any specific industry segment which is becoming big in terms of hiring.

Nilesh : What we see is that we are specifically for SMBs, so 94% of our revenue comes from SMBs. Right. And inside SMBs, what we see is that there's a growing demand for a profile called sales. Let it be field sales, let it be telesales, let it be business development, right? So we are seeing a growing demand for these. Files. Also, we see the Allied in allied things or allied profiles like technicians, construction garments, etc. All of these profiles were not online before, which is more offline. Also coming online for their hiring. So these are the profiles we see growing on our platform from last year to this year, and we forecast that they will continue to grow in the same way. It was done before.

Faiz : And if you can just give us an idea about how many potential employees and employers are onboarded with WorkIndia, and what is the number that you are expecting in the next year or so?

Nilesh : So in total, The Work India platform has 20,00,000 registered SMBs. OK, right. So 20,00,000 SMB have used the platform for their adding needs every month. Around 1,25,000 companies, or SMBs, post jobs on the job board. India platform, right? We are able to generate 90,000,000 connections. What I mean by connection is An employer talking to a candidate and a candidate talking to the employer on our platform. And we have been able to provide jobs to 155,900 candidates in a month. 90,000,000 conversations are Every month, I'm talking about a month. I'm talking about the monthly numbers. Right. So, in total, around 3 crore? Candidates have been registered under the working platform.

Faiz : That's huge in itself and in your observations towards the natural shift or inclination towards, you know, skill development, because what we have seen in the past few years is that a lot of people, young professionals, are investing their resources and time in skill upgradation. So how do you see that phenomenon happening on your platform?

Nilesh : We see upskilling growing in India at a very, very fast rate. And what we also see is that this upskilling is more from the standpoint that they want to get ready for the job. So basically, candidates prefer to do upskilling for 6 months, and then they land. Right. So that kind of upskilling we see happening will happen, and it is happening at a very fast rate. We don't see a ₹ 20,000-person group looking for a 2-year kind of course or a 3-year kind of course. Because money is a very important factor, short upskilling courses of 3 to 6 months are what we see growing, and this would happen more at offline centers than online. That's also what we forecast, because people are more interested in different things. They learn more from their peers and also when they're sitting in an offline classroom, especially in this category. And so that's what we see.