E-commerce job matching based training

Komerce comes to create collaboration between SMEs and rural youths to help them to optimize their business on the internet by training e-commerce skills to the youths and connect them with the SMEs. From this collaboration, they can get skills which enable them to get hired by the SMEs and earn income without leaving their hometown, and we can also help the SMEs to optimize their online business by providing affordable monitored skilled talents with remote hiring systems. With this remote collaboration, the SMEs do not need to worry about renting an office and paying operational costs. The services we offer are to accommodate SMEs to create a conducive environment for SMEs to grow because SMEs are one of Indonesia’s biggest economic pillars.

The number of urbanization from rural to urban areas in Indonesia keeps increasing year by year as it reaches around 5% and the number of people living in urban areas is more than the people living in rural areas that reaches 55%. The availability of job opportunities takes part in this. The limited job opportunities available in small towns becomes one of the biggest factors of rural youth urbanization and unemployment rate. The urbanization also affects the population density in the urban area by contributing 55% of the total population.

After four years of operations, we have trained more than 1,000 rural youths and currently around 500 of them are working for around 230 SMEs. Our solution tries to move the opportunities that are available in the urban area to rural areas with the remote system. To be able to conduct this solution, we have to give the skills needed by the industry. So, we train them with e-commerce skills such as Customer Service, Online Advertising, Marketplace Admin so that they will have the skills needed by the industry. Then after that, they will be connected to the SMEs that have collaboration with us. Currently, there are 64 million SMEs in Indonesia and 14 million of them are already active on the internet and we target 1 million of them.

The beneficiaries of our project are the rural youths, especially the ones living in Purbalingga and the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The youths are ranging from 17 - 25 years old. As they live in the outskirts, it is hard to get a job that makes them go to big cities or become unemployed so they do not have the income. We understand that this is mainly because of the job opportunity availability in the small towns and also because they do not have the skills needed by the industry. To be able to give them access to job opportunities, we give them training about e-commerce. 

With this skill training, the youth have the skills needed by the industry. Not only that, we also connect them to the SMEs that have collaboration with us so that they will get a job and salary for a living.

We provide solutions not only for one problem but two. We do not only aim to help the village youth that don’t have exposure to digital skills before to be able to get the skill and also enable them to be hired so that they don’t need to go to bigger cities but also help the SMEs that need skilled talents to optimize their business on the internet with affordable cost.

For the technology, we use our platform as a talent pool that allows SMEs to hire new talent. We develop two applications to scale up our impact.  The first application is the one used by the SMEs to allow them to hire talent and to monitor their performances. The other one is used by the talents to report their daily performance. We also use a web-based platform to maintain the data of talents and SMEs.

The target of our project is the youths in Indonesia so that this Challenge is trying to solve, the youths we are targeting are in the age range of 17-25 years old who are in the productive age. The problems youths face especially the ones in the rural areas that have limited access to job opportunities, especially because they do not have skills needed by the industry. What we do is by training them with skills in digital marketing including customer service,  digital advertiser, 

The solution we offer is a job matching based training to enable youths to access job opportunities. There are many youths in rural areas who go to big cities to get a job which causes population density in the big cities and the development gap between the urban and rural areas . The root cause of this problem is the limited job opportunities in the small towns and also the limited skill of the rural youths, especially regarding technology. This problem emerges in almost all parts of Indonesia and also happens in other countries too. 

Then Komerce provides digital skill training for the youths that enable them to be hired and then they will be able to earn money without leaving their hometown. With the youths staying in their hometown and the economic circulation runs well so that the rural area develops.

In 2020, the number of youths aged 15 - 34 years old in Purbalingga is 312.712 based on the Purbalingga Central Bureau of Statistics. We also operate in Yogyakarta, in Sleman Regency to be precise. The number of youths aged 15-34 years old in Yogyakarta is  The number of the SMEs that collaborate with us is currently around 230 which hire around 500 youths.

The CEO and founder, Nofi Bayu Darmawan

The solution we offer is innovative as we try to tackle the employment issue by giving skills training to youths so they will be able to get skills needed to be employed. In order to solve the urbanization and unemployment in the rural area, we solve it by giving them training about skills needed by the e-commerce business as e-commerce is currently rapidly increasing in Indonesia. Not only giving them skills needed by the industry, we also connect them to the SMEs so that they can get hired and earn income without leaving their hometown because the collaboration is conducted on a remote basis. 

We provide solutions not only for one problem but two. We do not only aim to help the village youth that don’t have exposure to digital skills before to be able to get the skill and also enable them to be hired so that they don’t need to go to bigger cities but also help the SMEs that need skilled talents to optimize their business on the internet with affordable cost.

For the technology, we use our platform as a talent pool that allows SMEs to hire new talent. We develop two applications to scale up our impact.  The first application is the one used by the SMEs to allow them to hire talent and to monitor their performances. The other one is used by the talents to report their daily performance. We also use a web-based platform to maintain the data of talents and SMEs. 

For the technology, we use our platform as a talent pool that allows SMEs to hire new talent. 

The SMEs can have cooperation with a digital agency but it costs a lot and usually big enterprises can afford such service. They can also hire their in-house team members but they have to provide an office so they have to cover for the monthly operational cost and the minimum wage in big cities is much bigger than the ones in rural areas.

In rural areas, many youths tend to go to bigger cities to get a job and some others remain unemployed while staying in their hometown. This is because of the limited job opportunities available and also the limited skills the youths have. 

In order to solve the problem, we start by providing e-commerce skills training for the rural youths so that they get skills needed by the industry. After that they will be listed in our talent pool and then we connect them with the SMEs. We create a remote working system so that the SMEs from all over Indonesia can have collaboration with us as long as  that have collaboration with us as w. With this collaboration, the rural youth can get a decent job without going to bigger cities. With this collaboration, we expect to see many rural youths to work in their hometown and they can earn their monthly salary. 

In the long term, there will be less unemployed youths, more youths will be employed and get a decent job and earn their income. This will lead to a better life quality and as there are many people working in the rural areas, the economic activity will run well there so that not only the youths’ life quality is increased but also the economic circulation in the rural areas.

In the next five years we want to be able to reach the youths, not only the ones who live near our offices. Currently, we have trained more than 1,000 youths and currently around 500 of them are hired. At the end of 2021, we started a new project  called Kampus Komerce which will reach the youths anywhere in Indonesia.

We try to reach our goal to be an end-to-end SME enabler in Indonesia and to reach that, we have to provide services that become the needs of the SMEs. Currently, we cover three main services in the e-commerce industry namely Online Advertising, Customer Service, and Marketplace Admin which skills are given during the training.

As our solution aims to provide e-commerce skills training to enable youths to access job opportunities. So, we measure our impact from the number of youths trained, the number of talents hired, and the amount of salary distributed.

If the pandemic doesn’t recover soon, there will be less SMEs that can recover and sustain. The SMEs are our stakeholder as they become our customer that will hire the skilled talents. The number of talents absorption is closely related with the SMEs that have collaboration with us. Another thing that becomes our challenge is that to keep our skills and service updated so that we can keep helping the SMEs and the youths.

Other things that become our barrier are the talent performance management about how to keep their performance well, user acquisition by marketing and also branding to create collaboration so that talent will be hired by the SMEs. We also have problems in the talent absorption because what we do is a job-matching based training so we have to reach more SMEs.

We plan to overcome these barriers by  adding new services that are updated with the e-commerce development. To reach this, we have to keep doing research on the skills that we can provide to the youths. Other than that, in order to support the collaboration and also to reach our goal to be an end-to-end SME enabler, we want to develop our technology. Currently, we use two applications to report and monitor performance and attendance, to send and receive payment, and to do evaluation. As we want to provide new services, we need to do more research and also to develop new technology. In order to manage talent performance management, we maximize the monitoring from our application and talent lead. We also have more training when there is a performance decrease. In order to be able to hire more talents, we have to reach more SMEs to have collaboration. To do this, we need to do more branding to create awareness to our business. 

Other things that become our barrier are the talent performance management about how to keep their performance well, user acquisition by marketing and also branding to create collaboration so that talent will be hired by the SMEs.

69 Full Time management team members

3 Internship team members

Our team consists of people who have experience in their positions such as experience in youth empowerment, user communication, technology development, product development, and user acquisition. They have years of experience in youth empowerment and youth leadership. Especially our founder who has experience in the e-commerce field for more than 9 years so he understands well about what the SMEs need.

Our technology team also has experience in developing applications meanwhile our product team develops and plans the products offered to the SMEs that can help them.

In order to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team, we hire teams based on their capabilities no matter what gender they are and where they are from. 

We are currently partnering with SMEs to employ the talents we have trained. We provide skilled talents to help them optimize their online business.

Komerce generates revenue from the monthly admin fee that the SMEs pay around USD 20-30 for every talent they hire, and from the 3% sharing fee of the hired talents’ salaries.

We apply for the Future of Work in India and Indonesia Challenge because we understand that by being visible, we may have a potential collaboration. Other than that, if we get the support then we will be able to create an impact wider.

As we are currently developing new products so that we need to do a product market fit and strategy. As we are also trying to keep us in the market, we have to do the right marketing strategy to reach relevant users. Other than that, we also need to measure the impact we have created from this 4 years of operation. In addition, we also need to develop our technology because we currently have two applications that are used to support the collaboration. We also plan to have service that uses application.