Babajob.com, the online jobs marketplace for the informal service sector has tied up with researchers from the World Bank to get insights into labour market policy making in India.
As part of the partnership, Babajob.com is providing access to data collected through its operations over the past seven years, including records of more than seven million job seekers, 450,000 employers, 1 million job posts with more than six million vacancies and an average of 450,000 applications per month made by job seekers.
“As India’s most active employment platform focusing on jobs with an average salary of about Rs 10,000 a month, we have vast amounts of data on job seekers and available employment opportunities in this sector. We believe that analysis of this data can significantly benefit many stakeholders in our space, especially the government and the skills development industry, and we are committed to democratizing this data for the benefit of all,” said Vir Kashyap, Co-Founder at Babajob.com.
“Big data could provide a novel opportunity to inform labor market and education policies. Unlike traditional sample surveys, it provides real-time information about the labor market with more detail and granularity,” said Shinsaku Nomura, Senior Economist at the World Bank.
Through the project, the joint team will also conduct a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) to test how jobseekers’ assessments of non-cognitive skills can contribute to a better match between job seekers and employers. The joint research agenda includes multiple dimensions of the labour market assessment, including India’s labour market trends related to seasonal, cyclical and structural trends, skills demand and supply, behavior and motivation of job seekers, and wage differences by gender, occupation, and location.
