Google will experiment into India’s entry-level job-research market with Kormo. It has been offering pilots in India since beginning this year for its next billion users (NBU) unit, said people familiar with the subject. These included ground study on how entry-level bookings were made in different areas.
The app will begin on Friday at the yearly Google for India meet in New Delhi; the firm told Economic times.
Kormo encourages users to look for jobs unusually posted online and for which there is no structured, searchable closet. It was initially produced by Area 120 Labs, the company’s in-house incubator and “workshop for innovative designs.”
The app debuted in its base market of Bangladesh, especially Dhaka, in September last year, before it was started in other key NBU markets. The Indonesia meeting took place before this time. Kormo includes work in Bengali. In Bangladesh and Indonesia, Kormo concentrates on three areas, including retail, hospitality and logistics, according to its website. But, it is worth seeing that Google is an investor in Bengaluru-based private concierge support company Dunzo, which also operates in the logistics space.
“Since we began Kormo in Bangladesh in 2018 and Indonesia this year, we’ve met over 50,000 job seekers to businesses from hundreds of companies who use Kormo for their contracting needs. Specifically, entry-level positions,” Bickey Russell, project lead, Next Billion Users, said in an email. “Because finding work is a real need beyond different markets, we’re starting to bring the same co-operation to nations like India.”
Data is scarce in entry-level positions. About 4.48 million bachelors each year, according to the government’s All India Survey on Higher Education for 2017-18. This reduces levels in engineering and medical sciences, where the number reaches almost 1 million. According to the Indian Staffing Federation, 83.8% of the country’s total workforce is known as safe.
India’s lay-off rate hit a three-year high of 8.4% in August 2019, according to data issued by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy at the opening of this month.
“Ever-increasing cost of hire on record of demand of labour not meeting the amount of labour is the most significant roadblock on human capital for companies,” said Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and vice-president at Teamlease Services Ltd. “If technology by any means fits this challenge for applicants, employers and job market aggregators, it shall improve comparable facilities – quicker, better, cheaper, and at scale exponentially.”
Kormo is likely to run into competition from well-established online classified advertising companies such as Quikr and OLX, which have acquired blue-collar job posting sites Babajob and Aasaanjobs, each, in new years. Besides these, there are extra-large, deep-pocketed companies such as Quess Corp, which has a people’s help upright, and Tech Mahindra’s Saral Rozgar.