With the emergence of several startup hubs in India and an unprecedented spurt in the amount of VC money being poured in, startups today have truly changed the playing field in the way a company conducts its business. Emerging trends reveal that around 80% of job seekers prefer a job at a startup than at an MNC, indicating that the time is ripe for startups to hire and grow.A key consequence of this growth however, is often left unexamined. To sustain the logistics and operations involved in the growth of a booming company, numerous blue collar and entry level white collar jobs are being created, particularly with the advent of hyper local and food delivery startups, where a simple skill such as being able to ride a bike ensures a steady livelihood for many. The services sector boom seems to have yielded the proverbial golden egg, in the form of tele-calling and customer service job opportunities.

The retail sector too employs numerous cashiers and counter sales executives. Then there are those jobs that have been cropping up across all sectors, with receptionists, office boys and data collection executives being just a few among them. It is projected that by 2020 around 3 lakh jobs can be generated by these startup.

Startups disrupt the status quo by scaling up their operations rapidly which would require hiring, at a faster pace, the most suitable candidates in order to compete with the established players. However, owing to its highly disorganised nature, there is an absence of any data and a subsequent bench marking of skills of job seekers in the blue collar and entry level segment. Many companies therefore find it difficult to ascertain the qualification of a candidate for a job profile and therefore to hire quickly. In such a situation, an assessment process to map candidates’ skill sets so that recruiters get access to candidates whose skill sets have been verified, helps reinforce their trust and to reduce attrition rates by hiring smartly.

However, to effectively bridge the gap between job requirements and candidate skills, requires the existing recruitment process to undergo a complete overhaul where requirement based hiring results in a perfect match with a candidate’s abilities. With nearly 38% of the population using smartphones and close to 564 million internet users in India today, technology could very effectively be leveraged to achieve a systemic change in the hiring mechanism, by bringing all the stakeholders together to form one single, fluid marketplace.

This, however, is just the beginning. Most of the startups are focused in just a few cities. As they expand pan-India, they will bring along with them a plethora of jobs in numerous functional areas. It is imperative therefore to have a technological support system in place so that a digital identity for each and every job seeker is created and the cogs in the wheels of the startup ecosystem are kept running.