The Skillr COVID-19 Job Tracker
How we helped 100,000 job seekers. And what we learn about ourselves in the process. 🧐
In April 2020, following the COVID-19 lockdown, millions of Indians were suddenly unemployed within weeks, a situation that brought uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. To improve the discovery of active job openings during the pandemic, Skillr launched the free “Covid-19 Job Tracker” to track the hiring status of companies in India.
We intentionally stayed away from building a complex website that required the engineering team, and leveraged a range of SaaS platforms to launch the platform within two weeks. And this decision paid off, because the rapid launch provided huge relief and hope to the job seekers. In addition to the quick access, jobseekers specifically appreciated the ability to view job openings directly, without being forced to share their contact details. Here’s what the earliest version looked like:
Very soon — from tens to hundreds, and then from hundreds to thousands — more and more job seekers began to access the platform. Witnessing that our tracker was demonstrating palpable impact, we continued to rally for marketing support from influencers on social media: From politician Atishi Marlena of A.A.P to comedians Rohan Joshi and Kaneez Surka, and even celebrity chef Pooja Dhingra, our tracker received resounding support from influencers across India and on various social media platforms.
As we crowdsourced more jobs and began attracting a pan-India audience, we knew we had to provide users greater control in how they were discovering opportunities relevant to them. By May-end, we built and launched our proprietary platform, which provided users multiple filtration tools to find the perfect jobs.
Come July, our tracked had demonstrated large-scale impact:
- It was visited by over 1,00,000 unique jobseekers, from 17 different industries 🚀
- It had crowdsourced over 4,000 jobs, from all across India 🙌
It was able to muster support from leading influencers, journalists, politicians, and coverage from media houses, including:
In the news 🤓
As we socially distanced ourselves for the benefit of all, helping fellow others online to contain panic and fear was an incredible responsibility. We are humbled to have had the opportunity to help people find meaningful work during the outbreak.
More philosophically — as you’ll find our team getting every once in a while! — our experience building the COVID-19 Jobs Tracker brought forth an epiphany. We realised that by acting rapidly, and working together to build an innovative solution for those in need, the members of our team embodied the very fundamentals of future-ready skills that we tout in the market. And outside of all the primary research, the psychometrics and the validation studies that we undertake to define the value of future-ready skills, we had the chance to experience first-hand the disproportionate value these skills played in our ability to create impact. Impact that didn’t require fancy engineering teams and big marketing budgets to change lives.
Even though our tracker has now retired, it remains our endeavour to provide reliable and trustworthy information to jobseekers in need. Our team has collected a few resources of companies actively doing important work in this space:
Jobseeker Resources 🤝
Online Support 🙏
Resources ✍️
Have another helpful resource? Comment with the link below and we’ll add it here! We have said it earlier, and we’ll say it again. This is perhaps the most important year in history to be together online. Thank you for being a part of our journey with the job tracker, and for helping spread the word to others.
What are we up to now?👇
