How would you build a job portal for poor people who migrate from villages to cities?

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How would you build a job portal for poor people who migrate from villages to cities?

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Nilesh Majumdar · Answer 1 · 2025-07-07T15:20:22+0000

Problem Scoping:
OKay just to understand the scope of this, by job portal you mean a platform where people can post job openings looking to hire people and candidates who are willing to get hired can see the job openings and apply. is that the correct understanding of what a job portal means?- Yes

okay and when I'm talking about poor people and immigration, how would we define poor people? do you have something in mind or I can assume something?- Assume this.

are we considering only regional immigration or international immigration as well? For the sake of discussion I would scope it down to regional immigration. Is that okay? Yes

Clarifying questions:

Why do we want to build a job portal for them if I may ask? - To solve unemployment and underemployment among migrant workers by giving them better access to local job opportunities, faster onboarding, and reduced dependency on middlemen or agents who often exploit them.
Is this a product from scratch or an extended feature of an existing product?- From scratch
Is there any time, resource and budget constratints?- assume 6-month MVP timeline, lean cross-functional team (1 PM, 2 devs, 1 designer, 1 QA), and tight budget — think frugal, high-leverage, zero-to-one.
How are these people getting acess to job market now? I mean what is there workaround?- Word of mouths with their friend, local contractors, labor chowks, whatsapp groups, facebook pages
Is there any other product in the market that servers the same segment and solves the exact same problem?- Yes other players are there
How are these people solving the problem? And how do you envision we do things differently?- Answers
Do you have a prefeernece of form factor between mobile vs web?- Assume this ( I'd assume mobile-first, Android-focused. Target users likely use low-end smartphones, not desktops. Web can come later for employers or admin tooling.)
Do you have a location or geography in mind where we can start the pilot project in India?- Assume this. (I can assume Mumbai, dense migrant worker population, diverse employer base (households, small businesses), and strong network effects potential. Great for a high-signal MVP.)
Do you want to monetize this or are we simply looking at user acquistion right now?- Free now, monetize this later once its adopted

Restate the refined problem statement:
Alright so if I have to restate the problem a bit. As a PM if I have to design a android application to provide jobs to the blue collar workers in Mumbai who have just migrated from other villages or cities within 6months and with the set of engineering team we have. Does this refined problem statement sound good to you? Yes

Cool. Let me quickly write down some user personas for this:
Job Seeker Side:
1. Non- Marathi language speaker who is about to migrate to Mumbai in order to look for a job- These are the folks who have heard great things about the city and are ready to come down here to look for a job
2. Native Marathi language speaker who is in Mumbai looking for a job- These are the folks who are already here, because they have acquired Marathi language its safe to assume that they might already have a bit of connections in the blue-collar segment

Job Poster Side:
1. Job poster who has just started his business and is looking for low wage workers from outside the city or from different states
2. Job poster who has a vacancy and wants someone to quickly fill the gap because it is hampers business

For the MVP phase-

From the job seeker side-

I would prioritize Persona 1 the Non- Marathi language speaker who is about to migrate to Mumbai because blue collar workers comes in Mumbai in huge numbers in order to search for jobs, and at that point of time they have no idea what kind of job they would be taking or the salary they would be drawing. A portal for them would be actually meanigful and would be invaluable. The tradeoffs are- Not all folks who migrate would be having a smartphone or an internet connection to search jobs. But then again these folks wont be our users either.

For the job poster side:

I would prioritize the persona 2, job poster who has a vacnacy or wants more people because in Mumbai its difficult to start a fresh business or shops and the numbers for that per year would be low compared to the replacement jobs or expansion mode businesses. So for the sheer volume and keeping more reach in mind I would prioritize this.

Does that align with you?- Yes

Okay let's now break that down to user stories:

Job Poster:

1. As a urgent replacement employer I should be able to post a job opening in the platform

2. As a As a urgent replacement employer I should be able to say by when I need a position to be closed

3. As a urgent replacement employer I should be able to say how much money I am willing to pay to the employee

4. As a urgent replacement employer I should be able to say the mode of payment to the employee

5. As a urgent replacement employer I should be able to say if I am making the payment day wise, week wise or monthly salary wise

6. As a urgent replacement employer I want to say if there are any other benefits I am providing on top of the salary

7. As a urgent replacement employer I want to post the location of the office where I can meet and interview

8. As a urgent replacement employer I want to post the dates where I am free for an interview or meet

9. As a urgent replacement employer I want to notify if the position is closed or not

10. As a urgent replacement employer I want to notify the language that I require

11. As a urgent replacement employer I want to say the skills I require

Job Seeker:

1. As fresh migrant, I would want to see the jobs that I am a great match for

2. As fresh migrant, I would want to see the jobs that I am ALMOST a great match for

3. As fresh migrant, I would want to know where I have to go to meet the person for the interview

4. As fresh migrant, I would want to know how much money will be paid to me for the job- the mode of payment, frequency of payment, the bonus if any, leaves I will get

5. As fresh migrant, I want to know if the job is safe or not, is it a verified employer or not

Out of these user stories I would prioritize:

Job Poster: 1. 1/3/4/5/6/10/11 because these are Must to solve and the impact is very high and the effort is low.

Others user stories are good to solve and can be solved incrementally depending on the initial feedback.

Job Seeker: 2. 1/2/3/4/5 I would prioritize these 5 because all these 5 are extreme high impact, low effort and must to solve for

Does that look good to you? Yes

Quick panel question- How would you handle trust and safety on the platform, especially since exploitation is common in this space?
Answer-
Umm. From the top of the mind it could solved through onboarding of the job poster, something as basic as a selfie, which further verified by the poster/owner's Aadhar and PAN card,and upon verificcation can be shown as verified and anyone who skips that journey can be unvirfied status. we can use some APIs from third parties, it will take a month to close down the legals and the paperwork between our platform and the API provider. We can also give a confidence score from our side based on the employers hiring pattern, reviews, payouts, enagagement in the platform etc but this probably would come later. For the 1st timers I would probably integrate the APIs in onboarding as a non-blocker journey and then monitor it for couple of days or week to see if that needs to be made blocker journey or not

Okay go on with the solutions:

Jop Poster:

User story	Solution	Effort	Impact	Notes
Post job opening	Simple form: job title, category, brief description	Low	High	Core flow — CTA right on home screen
Explain the Job	Simple 2mins Voice recording that breifly explains the job and the requirement	Medium	High	Simple voice record button on the job screen
Specify salary	Input field with drop-down unit (per day/week/month)	Low	High	Required field
Mode of payment	Drop-down: Cash, UPI, Bank	Low	High	Adds trust; keep optional
Salary frequency	Radio button selection (daily/weekly/monthly)	Low	High	Show it prominently on job post
Other benefits	Free-text with smart tags (meals, stay, bonus)	Medium	Low	Suggest popular perks via chips
Language required	Multi-select language checkboxes	Low	Medium	Drives match quality for seekers
Skills required	Predefined tags (e.g., driving, cleaning, loading) + free-text	Medium	Medium	Improves relevance in matching

Job Seeker:

User story	Solution	Effort	Impact	Notes
See great matches	Algorithm to match skills/language/location → "Best fit" jobs section	Medium	High	Use weighted tags for matching
See “almost fit” jobs	Show second section: “You may still apply”	Medium	High	Improves discovery; avoids dead-ends
Interview location	Auto-map to location via Google Maps or static address	Low	Medium	Show location clearly with directions
Salary, payment details	Salary, mode, frequency, benefits clearly displayed	Low	High	Make it readable even in low-literacy UI
Job safety/verified employer	Badge: “Verified Employer” (KYC + confidence score)	Medium	High	Boost trust; allow user to filter by this

Metrics to track:
Acquistion metric:
DOD, WOW, MOM growth of new registrations of employers
DOD, WOW, MOM growth of new registrations of employees

Engagement and Retention Metric:
Engagement- No. of applies/logged in users- Day wise/Week wise/Month Wise trend (We can define a succefull engagement as when an onboarded job seeker applies to a job post)
Avg No. of applies per user- DOD, WOW, MOM
D0-D7-D14-D30- Repeat users
Trust metric:
Comparision between the ratio of vefried job post: number of applies VS non-verified job post: number of applies

We can set a +-5% buffer for all these metrics to see if there is any sudden alarming signs and we start the RCA asap in war footing.