One million jobs, major boon to local economy
The Government’s ambitious ‘Three Year Economic Delivery Programme’, will be a major boon to Sri Lanka’s job market as it envisages creating one million new jobs along with other medium-term targets such as per capita income of US$ 5,000, FDI inflows of $5 billion, and doubling exports to $20 billion by 2020.
The budget has identified skills as the biggest hurdle faced by Sri Lankan youth in navigating the job market as they do not possess the required skill-set needed by the market. Under this initiative the government has proposed to implement a programme where groups of youth will undergo three to six month training courses in a specific skill.
Finding the right job is as difficult as finding the right candidate for the job. Sri Lankan jobseekers are struggling. There is a gap between the aspirations of a jobseeker and the expectations of the corporate sector. The struggle is directly proportional to the mismatch – something the existing recruitment infrastructure in the country can’t seem to fix so far.
Jobpal.lk is registered as a premium jobseeker where he or she may upload their CV, fill basic details, then receives a five-digit CV ID. After dialing the registration code, the jobseeker may enter the CV ID whilst all other details will be automatically collated from his or her profile. The facility is offered at a reasonable Rs 3 (+ taxes) per day. Currently this service is available for Dialog and Hutch mobile users. In addition Jobpal extensively uses Facebook and other social media tools for marketing, along with direct marketing methods.
Our main target segment or value proposition would be the jobseeker category. In addition to offering the basic services of searching for jobs and applying for vacancies absolutely free of charge, the applicants may opt for our premium service, where Jobpal Team would apply for jobs aggressively on behalf of the jobseeker.
Having personally seen many of my friends and colleagues face the struggle in entering the job market, Jobpal.lk has taken up the challenge to fix this issue once and for all. This might be one of the reasons why so many online recruitment start-ups have sprung up in Sri Lanka, but we are cut above the rest as our core business is catering to the needs of the jobseekers.
Despite its just 6-month existence, Jobpal.lk gets a significant 50 – 80 new vacancies each day, which are categorized into local and foreign, and currently has over 1,000 odd local and over 500 foreign jobs at any given moment.
(An engineer with 11 + years of experience in a leading telecommunication operator in Sri Lanka, the writer quit his lucrative job and started E-FutureTech Systems (Pvt) Ltd last year and launched JobPal.lk as a fully-owned product of the company in June 2017)