Despite being well qualified, many women tend to stay back home after taking a career break — either for personal reasons or for the sake of the family. Online portal JobsForHer is helping women restart their careers by connecting them with various start-ups and multinational companies and helping them find jobs. This portal, which is based in Bengaluru, is present even in Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad.
The brains behind JobsForHer is Neha Bagaria, who has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The idea to set this portal up was born when she faced a lot of challenges when she wanted to get back to work after taking a long break. She says, "I started my career in the Medical Education and Pharmaceutical industry. A few years ago, when I had children, I took a break for about three and a half years. It was during this time that I realised, women go through lots of challenges when they want to get back to work. According to my research, currently, more than 10 per cent of the women in India who are graduates and post-graduates continue to stay at home after a break. I wanted to get them back to work. Thus, I came up with a job portal only for women in India."
Neha launched her portal on International Women's Day in 2015. From then, it has helped around 30,000 women get placements in reputed companies. The portal has around 3,00,000 monthly visitors and 4,500 companies who have tied up with them to hire women. Apart from getting jobs, the organisation also helps them brush up their skills and get acquainted with the latest technology that might be used in a particular field. "We have around 300 reskilling partners from various educational institutions to train women through workshops and webinars. Every profession evolves every day and new technology is being used. Thus, we help them understand how to use certain tools. As a part of the workshop, we teach them to how to write a good resume as well," she explains. She added that the recent survey conducted by JobsForHer on reskilling women stated that 35.5% want to get trained in technical skills, 30.9% are looking for soft skills, 21.7% are looking for confidence-building support and 11.6% stated that they require expert services.
There are two types of reskilling that takes place. While some women want to brush up on their existing skills, some want to reinvent their jobs and try something new. "For instance, there might be women who have been in HR but now want to explore content writing. They are trained by our experts in the reskilling programmes. These programmes can either be online or offline," she adds. Applying for a job through JobsForHer is not a complicated task. One has to submit a resume along with other supporting documents. Depending on the requirement of job profiles, the portal connects them with the companies.
In order to motivate, strengthen and guide them to balance their work and personal life, the start-up also has 500 professionals from companies like Biocon as mentors on the board. "While we worked on this portal, we realised that women will not be able to balance home and work. Mentors provide real-life experiences on how are they managing different responsibilities at the same time. On a weekly basis, we have webinars for them and women can attend at their convenience. These services are all free of cost," she says.
In the future, Neha is planning to help women rise in their careers. She says, "We are not just helping women get into jobs but I want them to get senior ranks in corporate companies. That is when it fulfills the motto of JobsForHer."
