By Lancelot Joseph. Executive Editor, Business India

The job market is in a flux. “Over 25 million existing jobs have been lost between January and May 2021 and the bulk of these losses – about 22 million – have occurred in April and May, the period in which India was engulfed by Covid-19, leading to state-level lockdowns of varying degrees.” These chilling figures emerge from the latest results of the periodic surveys carried out by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

“There were no jobs available readily,” explains Ravish Agrawal, co-founder & CEO, Able Jobs Ltd (AJL). “But we have been able to arrange about 5,000 jobs to people since inception,” he adds. Earlier, Agrawal had worked with Udacity India, managing the India B2C business.

“I had also founded an ed-tech start-up during my time at IIT Kanpur, where we were solving the problem of school admissions for first-time parents,” he says. An IIT Kanpur 2016 graduate, he has been involved in entrepreneurship since his college days. “Able Jobs is my third attempt at solving education problems.” 

Agrawal is one of the three co-founders of AJL. The second co-founder and product head, Siddharth Srivastava, has also worked with companies like Udacity, Payment, and Lendingkart. He was also a part of MIT Media Labs entrepreneurship Bootcamp and started a mentorship platform during college, aimed at helping engineers with their first job by connecting them to industry-relevant mentors.

The third co-founder and CTO, Swatantra Kumar has worked with Yatra before. During his college days, Kumar, co-founded two start-ups, one of which was a college education platform. He worked with the data science team at Yatra and has been developing technologies of tomorrow like AR search, flight booking through chatbots, and more. All the three founders knew each other from their college days and have done an ed-tech start-up before. Able Jobs is a training and placements app for entry-level roles in sales and support.

AI-based tools

It trains entry-level job seekers for roles in sales and support. “Job seekers download our app and then go through our training courses,” explains Kumar. “After completion of the course, we connect them to companies and get them jobs. Once a student gets a job, he pays Able Jobs for training & placement. Our app contains state-of-the-art features that help learners practise rigorously for their presentation skills and gain confidence for the job. We have developed AI-based tools that help us understand the language and communication skills of the candidates and then provide personalised feedback to thousands of students in seconds; it recommends jobs that are best suited to them.”

“Companies recruit their sales and support team through Able Jobs,” adds Srivastava. “We provide companies with the assessment of candidates, so that they can better analyse the candidature, instead of just depending on resumes for screening recruits.  Companies like Paytm, Bigbasket, Great Learning have hired from our pool.” 

“We help people get jobs with salaries of Rs15,000-40,000 per month. Most of the people are located in job hubs like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru; however, due to Covid, we have also seen a surge from Tier II cities like Bhopal, Lucknow, Jaipur and more,” points out Agrawal. The sectors they look at for hiring in volumes in sales and support roles, include e-commerce, ed-tech, insurance, banks, BPO, etc.