NEW DELHI: Hiring a driver can be a hitand-miss affair, sometimes literally so. However, the National Career Service (NCS) unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week aims to turn the employment of such workers — domestic help, caretakers, plumbers, electricians — into less of a gamble on both sides. More importantly, it could evolve into one of the world’s biggest employment portals if the government is able to put the ambitious thinking behind the plan into effect.Hiring in the unorganised sector currently takes place by word of mouth or through placement agencies that charge heavily and aren’t always dependable. As part of efforts to regularise the process and make it more reliable, the government is encouraging individual households, entrepreneurs and small businesses to register themselves on the NCS portal to seek out people with the required skills. NCS services are free while details of both the employer as well as the job seeker will be Aadhaar-based and hence authenticated.The qualifications listed will be verified by educational institutions and universities as well. The government is also eyeing exclusive tie-ups with big corporate houses and ministries to hire professionals through the portal. "Our biggest challenge is to get employers. Hence, we will soon kick-start the exercise to rope in private players as well as government ministries and departments to post all their job vacancies on the portal for the benefit of large numbers of job seekers," a senior government official told ET."Besides, we are contemplating to tie up with existing job portals like Naukri.com or Monster.com as well as private agencies to work through this portal," added the person, who didn’t want to be named. The NCS portal already has a database of more than 2 crore job seekers and over 9 lakh establishments looking for candidates. A labour ministry estimate suggests that there are over 1 crore unemployed youth in the country while another 4 crore are under employed. With information on 11,000 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and more than 12,000 vocational training programmes, the portal and counselors associated it will help candidates get guidance on the right career options for them.NCS has generated interest from private portals. "We have jobs but don’t have access to authentic job seekers. NCS can certainly provide us with a huge verified database," said an executive at a large job online jobs company. The company is contemplating of some kind of association with NCS, the official said. Making NCS registrations Aadhaar based will allow job seekers to look for work anywhere in India. Integration with authorities such as the Central Board of Secondary Education and universities means mark sheets can be verified thus reducing the probability of fake resumes.For job seekers it means the authentication of employers. According to the official cited above, the ministry will soon reach out to industry groupings to encourage their members to join. It will also write to government departments and ministries to post vacancies and hire through the NCS portal. "The next step forward in order to make the portal more vibrant would be entering into MoUs (memoranda of understanding) with existing job portals to reach out to their database of employers," the official added."However, we will have to work out the business model as all these portals are subscription based while our mandate under the ILO ( International Labour Organisation ) convention is to provide free employment services." The Indian Staffing Federation , the only private placement agency to have partnered with the government on the portal thus far, feels credibility is the biggest draw. "Government is the largest organisation in country and a job portal from it offers trust and credibility to primary job seekers who are otherwise sceptical of posting their profile on private portals, fearing that they would be cheated," said ISF executive director Suchita Dutta.