Coronavirus: Indian job portals are upgrading services to help laid-off employees

Coronavirus has brought with it several crippling blows to the Indian economy. The most apparent impact has been the furloughs and layoffs across aviation, media, and IT industries, among others.

Now, job portals in the country are stepping up to help those who lost their livelihoods because of the Covid-19 pandemic by offering free assistance in building resumés and making connections with potential employers.

Websites like Indeed.com, Naukri.com, and Monster.com all have dedicated sections on their homepage for those impacted by Covid-19.

Noida-headquartered Naukri.com has started a service where it chooses laid-off professionals and offers them tips on creating resumés, be scored on the basis of their profile, and have access to a live tracker of industry-wise job openings. Such profiles will also be marked as “immediately available” for being hired.

Similar moves have been made by the Indian arm of the global employment website Monster.com. Its Covid-19 section offers career advice, support for finding the right job for one’s skills, and options for work-from-home roles. Indeed.com, also a global employment platform, has additional tips on using its services and making one’s profile stronger for its search engine.

Professional networking platform LinkedIn, too, has been collating and posting open roles at Indian and multinational companies. This “non-exhaustive list” is based on posts from companies and CEOs on its platform.

“In the long term, it makes sense to have a consolidated pool of talent that can be readily hired,” said Sanjay Lakhotia, CEO of human resources consulting firm Noble House. He said that in the case of manufacturing, for instance, companies who initially let employees go are now looking to hire again. “But many in the industry now face challenges in terms of finding the right manpower.”

These efforts could go a long way in salvaging the current situation where thousands of professionals have been rendered jobless in the middle of a global pandemic that’s crippling economies across the world.

Since the coronavirus lockdown began in India on March 25, over 3,000 people were laid off at tech unicorns alone. This phase also saw layoffs at larger companies like financial services firm Indiabulls, which reportedly sacked 2,000 employees. On May 26, Uber announced that it would be laying off 600 employees in India. One of India’s largest IT companies, Wipro is also reportedly considering cutting its staff strength.

Given the magnitude of job loss, some business leaders and industry veterans have taken it upon themselves to help laid-off employees in their respective sectors.

Self-driven

Hitesh Rajwani, CEO of marketing firm Social Samosa, recently posted on LinkedIn that his company has launched a programme where recruiters in marketing and advertising can share job descriptions and potential employees can share their profiles, and relevant connections will be facilitated by the company.

On a significantly larger scale is the People + Work Connect, a global collaboration between companies conceptualised by chief human resource officers from Accenture, Lincoln Financial Group, ServiceNow, and Verizon. This platform, built by Accenture, is aimed at shortening the “complex, often lengthy cycle of unemployment for people,” according the People + Work Connect.

In essence, it works as a business-to-business platform that enables companies laying off staff to reach out to companies that could best utilise this talent. Through this platform, the companies share non-confidential information from an employee’s profile, such as geographic location, and skills and experience.

Startups, too, have deployed their human resource teams for “outplacement” of laid off staff. Companies like Cure.fit, for instance, have been regularly sharing job openings with the staff it laid off, besides offering career counselling, according to Mint newspaper.

This article first appeared on Quartz.