The Union government is partnering with private entities to collect jobs data and build a platform to aggregate employment openings in real time.

It has formed partnerships with 20 entities including job boards and staffing companies to provide access to its vast pool of over 37 million registered job seekers to job openings and provide it with real time data on jobs availability in India.

“Bringing jobs to seekers is more important than who is bringing it," said Pravin Srivastava, deputy director general, employment at the labour ministry. “What we are building is a sector agnostic and promoter agnostic collaborative platform which will be beneficial to job seekers."

As many as 12 million people are entering India’s labour market every year. The proportion of people in the labour force declined from 43% in 2004-05 to 39.5% in 2011-12 with a sharp drop in the female participation rate from 29% to 21.9% in the same period, according to the labour ministry.

“First, we created the national career service portal, and then, we are tying up with private players of all hues and looks to build a real-time database on jobs," Srivastava said. “If large players like Shine.com give us a bigger visibility, another player FreshersWorld will connect first-time job seekers with jobs. We have tied up with players who are in formal as well as in informal space."

The government has understood that aggregating jobs is a challenge and the best way to do is through collaboration, said Vivek Chandok, chief executive of website Saral Rozgar, a jobs website run by Tech Mahindra Ltd. “When you create an online platform, it has its own challenge of language, last mile connectivity and bringing blue collar workers on board. “Here, we come to the picture—who can bring white, blue and grey collar workers on one platform," Chandok said.

Manish Sabharwal, chairman of staffing company TeamLease Services, said the country does not have a job problem but wage problem and the efforts everyone is making is to take informal workforce to the formal workforce pool.

“For a clear picture of the number of jobs available, one must keep a track of both formal and informal jobs available and the government is trying to achieve that," said Nirmal Singh, chief executive of job assessment and matching company Wheebox that has tied up with the labour ministry.

Aggregating jobs in one platform will give a sense of what is available and where is the gap, he said.

“It’s a win-win for government, private job boards like us and employers," said Amit Garg, executive director (Digital) at HT Media Ltd, which runs Shine.com and is also the publisher of Mint.

At any given point of time, Shine.com has between 150,000 to 200,000 job postings and when big companies like us come together it will improve the visibility of government’s efforts, Garg said.

“While the government’s efforts will get more visibility, job portals will get more traffic because the talent pool registered with the government and the employers will have more choice," he explained. “Now technology is available to aggregate jobs in real-time and government can make use of our resources and postings to build a system that will help in gap analysis and better policy making."

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