Helper4U.in

Unorganized workforce forms more than 90% of the Indian workforce. 20% of this is in urban slums, working as domestic and office Helpers. These uneducated and/or unskilled job seekers, especially women, find it difficult to access good job opportunities, without the need of a middleman. Reason is lack of education, skills and networks. Presence of a middleman usually leads to  financial or physical exploitation.

We enable these jobseekers get better job options, as well as job skills, by just using their mobiles, without any middleman. Even someone not using email, or text messages can benefit as employers proactively contact them. Result: mobility by choice rather than migration by force.

The problem is same globally for the unorganised workforce, and our solution can be easily replicated across geographies, with some changes. 

As per an 2001 cencus apprx. 120 million people had migrated in India in search of jobs due to varying factors, including natural calamities. Most of these joined the unorganized work force, including as domestic workers and office Helpers. With increasing migration job seekers continue to struggle with issues related to finding job opportunities, safety, exploitation as well as being skill ready for jobs in urban environments. These challenges increase manifold for women, especially since they lack any kind of network. Helper4U seeks to solve these challenges through digital inclusion, without even the need of an email.

With increasing mobile and internet penetration in India, we are enabling job seekers across boundaries to find better job opportunities, where they want, and connect with employers on their terms, without the need of any middleman. These middlemen are the biggest reason of financial and physical exploitation of these workers. By removing them, we are helping these job seekers find and accept better jobs, on their terms. We are also using mobile based training to offer job related skills irrespective of where they are. 

We are working with the uneducated and/or unskilled workers, looking to find jobs as domestic or office helpers. These people often migrate in search of a job, reside in urban slums, have no safe networks for job search and rely on word of mouth about jobs. This rural migrant, and often urban, working population of semi-skilled and unskilled workers face the following challenges:
1. Get exploited by middlemen while looking for jobs
2. Are usually on contract and need to change jobs frequently
3. Are not well networked. Their network is limited to their friends or relatives or to particular physical travel radius. As a result the reach of information about employment providers and opportunities is limited or delayed
4. Gain job information mainly through reference from friends / relatives or a physical visit to employer sites to ask for employment, which is tiring, time consuming

This segment had been excluded from the digital economy because of:
1. Mobile phones as well as Internet were costly. Situation has changed now
2. They were uneducated and could not use sms or email. Whatsapp has helped eliminate this to a large extent as they can now communicate using audios

With increasing penetration of mobiles and internet, we are turning the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce into Digital Citizens who can get information about jobs digitally through sms, mobile apps, social networking applications or simple phone calls. We use mobile technology and internet to:
1. Provide an Internet based classified listing of semi-skilled and unskilled workers looking to get a job as a maid, cook, baby sitter, elder care, driver, security guard, delivery boy etc. Employers proactively search for Helpers using filters, and call matched employees with a job offer. This does away with any exploitation or need of payment of any commission in return for a job for the job seeker
2. Enable people from villages and small towns to get calls for interviews before they move to a metro for a job. Interviews also happen through a Video call
3. Access mobile based training to help them do better in their job roles

We are now uniquely placed to scale as most of our transnational processes are automated.

We are using our database of 45,000 Helpers for word of mouth publicity, largely using WhatsApp, which is the preferred mode of communication among the bottom of the pyramid. This is because of this medium's versatility in use of images, audio and video, in addition to text.

As a result, we doubled our job seeker registrations over the last year and increased our monthly revenue 5 times, while bringing down our operational costs by 50%.

The other organisations working in the placement of Helpers are manpower placement agencies, who work as a middleman in connecting the Helper and employer. This makes their model operationally heavy, and dependent on having a physical office every where they operate.

We are a self-service website for employers. Employers select Helpers and call them directly. So, we are operationally extremely lean & work out of a single office while being present across the country. We connect with people through a call rather than email, & thus help even the uneducated who can use a mobile. Most of our processes are automated and do not require human intervention. We are increasingly using AI to connect the two sides better. 
There is no one in India working with this model exclusively for this segment.

Our whole business is tech enabled, right from managing Helper database, verifying the Helpers online, through APIs connected to our partners, connecting with them using automated calls & WhatsApp messages, keeping their profiles updated & rated through logic running in the background (based on their responses to employer calls) to helping job seekers create good resume.

Employers access Helper profiles online, can check Helper availability by click of a button, and update their remarks online, which triggers update in helper profiles. Every interaction has a result which feeds into Helper profile and helps match better next time for employer as well as seeker. 

With increasing penetration of internet, job seekers are creating and accessing their profiles, on their mobile (either by self or through help of their children who are usually educated).

Interviewing and/or verifying Helper details while onboarding and offering customer service are the main manual process in our business.

By helping job seekers get job information on their phones we do the following:

1. Enable employers to find Helpers locally and contacting them on their phones. 

2. Enable Helpers find jobs nearer home. This helps save time, money and other resources. At times it prevents migration. All savings are pumped back into betterment of families. Women who were not able to work earlier due to lack of knowledge of part time work opportunities have entered the workforce, working on their time and adding to their family income. 

3.  Ensure that Helpers get multiple job offers ad they can choose the best one. This helps get better paying, as well as better jobs in terms of job roles. We have Helpers who worked as maids earlier and are now nannies. Or those ho worked in multiple homes earlier, and now make much more by working in a single home

4. Ensure safety of Helpers as they are not dependent on any middleman in a new city.  5% of our database comprises migrants looking to work anywhere in the country. We have enabled them to find jobs, interview and finalize job terms, before moving from their homes. 

5. Ensure that Helpers get to keep all that they earn, without having to share it with any middleman. Also, since employers also do not have to pay a middleman they are ready to pay more to Helpers

Helper4U today has 50,000 Verified job seekers registered with it. We have helped about 40% of these connect with better paying job options, & often better jobs in terms of job roles (eg.: a cleaning lady becoming a nanny or an office boy becoming a delivery boy) A maid earning INR 8,000 by working in 4 different houses can now earn apprx. INR 12,000 by working in a single home, that too closer to their home. The savings in time and money get invested back in their families.

This number can grow 3X every year for the next 5 years. Additional service will be in the form of mobile based certified training as internet penetration increases further.

Metrics we monitor are:
1. New Job seeker registrations
2. Number of Employer visits
3. Self registrations by job seekers
4. Employer-Job seeker connects

Over the next year we aim to:
1. Break even
2. Reduce the Job Seeker to Paid Employer ratio by 50%
3. Treble the number of Job Seekers in our database

4. Reach new geographies within the country, largely source of Helpers for the country

5. Create a network of Helpers (like LinkedIn) so that they can help each other

6. Offer proper certified courses for job seekers related largely to supplementary skills required in their job roles.

Our biggest external risk is social media giants like Facebook using its user data to create a job portal for the bottom of the pyramid. The next risk if the failure of servers or internet on a large scale at any given time.

The only internal risk at present is data security.

We are working on creating an ecosystem around job search to ensure stickiness, and to hold on to the gains of the first mover advantage.

We have managed the internal risk by creating a robust security mechanism to track data access, and restrict data download or change.

Helper4U was founded in 2016 by Meenakshi Gupta Jain and Punit Jain. Meenakshi completed her MPhil form JNU, while Punit is an MBA Engineer from IIM-IIT respectively. 

Meenakshi is now CEO of Helper4U, while Punit works a a tech advisor.

Today it employs 12 people, taking care of website development, digital marketing and onboarding of Job Seekers. 

Helper4U is based out of Mumbai. It started out of the home of its founders, moved to a plug and play space and now operates out of a rented office space. We manage our pan India operations through a single office. We hire freelance field workers in different cities, whenever we need to, largely to reach the job seekers. Most of our onboarding staff is from slums itself, so uniquely placed in understanding the problems of teh job seekers. This helps us continuously improve our offering.

Over the last 4 years we have gained insights into the bottom of the pyramid, have built trust among the job seekers, and gained a lot of visibility among employers through various acknowledgements and awards by different organisations. Some of them are:
1. $250,000 grant from Internet.org for helping migrants using technology, in 2015. This grant helped us improve our team as well as offering and grow our business
2. Cohort of Upaya Social Ventures in 2017
3. Cohort of the Code for the Next Billion Accelerator by NASSCOM and Facebook (2018). We were recognized as the best Social Startup in the Cohort. FB showcased us across all major Newspapers in India


The sector we work in is considered a very tough sector and the fact that we have survived and grown for the last 5 years gives us a first mover advantage.

We have also built many partnerships over the years. SOme of these are:

1. Alliance with an organisation to support us in verification of Helpers. 

2. Network of franchises to help us in onboarding Helpers in a cost effective way. These are largely people working in slums where job seekers reside.

3. Being the online placement partner for DWSSC, a government orgaisation training domestic workers

4. Partnerships with NGOs working in slums across cities

5. Partnerships with domestic workers unions

We charge a subscription fees to the employers (home owners and businesses) to allow them to connect with Helpers they like. 

We also offer verification services to employers in return for a fees. This helps them save time and hassle if they had to do it themselves. We offer criminal background check, document as address verification services.

Another service we offer is of marketing and job posting opportunity to home owners and businesses to find good Helpers by reaching out to similar candidates in our database. Registered Helpers can then refer their friends for jobs. 

The service is free for the job Seekers. We do offer paid, automatic resume building service to job seekers. 

We hope to break even through our service offerings, by end of 2019. We also plan to raise grants and/or investments to scale now that our model is proven and working well. 

If selected as a Solver, we will use the prize funding and resources to:

1. Formalize our online training for Helpers by creating complete certified course modules and marketing them. This will ultimately become a revenue generation offering
2. Market our services to the penetrate the source of Helpers across the country. This will largely include feet on the street, and radio/app based advertisements
3. Expand our team. We will hire an Operations Manager to achieve point 2 above, one HR lead and call center employees to take care of increased onboarding