Babajob.com and babalife.com are a combined effort to provide the best social networking and job site in India and worldwide. Our effort is based on two simple ideas:
1. Everyone deserves to get a better job, no matter what their income or skill level, and
2. Technology can enhance our ability to both hire more efficiently, and better communicate with those we care about.
Most people find jobs through people they know – namely their extended social network – and most employers – particularly when hiring employees that work in the home - would like to hire a person who someone they trust can vouch for. Babajob.com and babalife.com are an attempt to digitize this process to efficiently “get the word out” and importantly provide an incentive for the folks in between an employer and employee to connect people together.
Here's how we hope to achieve this:
First we have created the most compelling social-networking site for everyone in India – babalife.com – including folks who may not be interested in finding a new job or hiring anyone right. Babalife.com is available through both the web and a rich SMS UI, combines a blog, photo/video-sharing and social-networking site and is available in local Indian languages. We hope you’ll be able to connect in richer ways with the people you care about and find it fun too.
Second, on babajob.com, we aim to connect employers and employees - especially those in the informal sector - by leveraging when possible their social relations from babalife.com. Perhaps most interestingly, we also provide a real incentive – in the form of mobile phone credits or a check when monthly earnings exceed 300R (~$7) – to help others get jobs or simply be a person who socially connects employers and employees.
Here’s an example: Let’s say Rajesh is looking for a cook. He creates a posting on babajob.com and adds a few people he knows on babalife.com. Now let’s assume that he ultimately decides to hire his uncle’s driver’s sister. Assuming all these folks are on babalife.com, then both Rajesh’s uncle and his driver, will earn 100R (~$2.5).
We also know that many of the people who might be hired through babajob may not have access to a computer or phone, and so their accounts can be managed by a friend, relative, NGO or even a cyber-café operator – called a mentor. Again, whenever someone is hired, their mentor also earns 100R.
We hope that by offering the most compelling social network and a set of cash based incentives, we can build a solution that leverages technology to help more people get better jobs and meaningfully connect to each other. It's an experiment and in the end, we hope it works.
