HOMEGROWN job-search app provider FindWork officially launched in the Philippines, benefiting all the 4.1 million certified Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda) graduates, as well as other skilled and service-sector workers in the country.
Created by tech experts and app innovators Kevin Williams and Allen Tan, this online recruitment platform was established to cater specifically to the large yet underserved “blue-collar” market, which the company referred to as trabahunters who are always looking for employment opportunities.
“When we decided to launch FindWork, it’s not about just the technology. It’s about the people that we are reaching out to. This [blue-collar] population in the Philippines makes up over 56 percent of the working population,” Williams, CEO of FindWork, said during the kick-off event held at the Shangri-La Makati last week.
According to him, this labor force experiences almost a 5-percent average turnover yearly. Nevertheless, there’s no job-search platform available that specifically catered to this sector until FindWork had its soft launch three months ago, shortly after its kickoff in Indonesia.
“So, as we are focusing on this market, we are looking at how can we deliver the best solution to the people of the Philippines,” he said.
Part of this endeavor is their tie-up with Tesda, which he described as “a game-changing partnership for us and for the people of the Philippines.”
Such collaboration guarantees that the 2.1 million graduated and 2 million upcoming graduates under the Tesda program will immediately be included in the FindWork system to increase their chances of employment.
“We in Tesda are happy that we finally have a partnership with FindWork,” Tesda Director Cariza A. Dacuma said. “We found a solution with them to connect our graduates and the employers.”
The employment-search platform also tied up with Southeast Asia’s leading financial services provider, TrueMoney. Both endeavors aim to foster stress-free and opportunity-driven growth for the trabahunter market.
“We are actually going to offer tools for these Filipinos to better manage their finances once they start earning in the future. So [we] potentially offer solutions for them to save money, affordably send remittances out to their relatives in the provinces, and to better manage their expenses, as well,” TrueMoney Managing Director Xavier Marzan said.
Since recruitment is a two-way process that requires communication between the employer and applicant, FindWork tied up with Smart Communications. This specifically leverages on the telco’s infrastructure to provide data to a market that’s reliant on free data surfing. It also ensures that the job-search app can always be used with all its components without lagging or having to disable features.
“One of the biggest problems [of connecting an employer to a prospective employee] is communication. How will a hiring company reach out to jobseekers? It’s very difficult. We wanted to partner with Smart [to] offer the FindWork app for free inside a free net. So now, anybody that’s searching for a job can get access free of data charges,” said Williams.
FindWork has special filters to help both parties easily find matches based on experience, training, position and even geolocation. Also, it has a chat feature that allows employer and jobseeker to talk in real time.
“Everybody has a smartphone,” he explained. “So it was only natural for us to utilize this as the next step for better job searching by first underscoring that the hiring process is a two-way street.”
Among the big companies that FindWork has signed up are Vivo, SM, Hotel Sogo, Starbucks and Office Warehouse. Each company regularly posts four to five job openings on average.
The app is currently available on Android-powered mobile phones and will be up for iOS devices in the next few weeks. It’s for free to use by the jobseekers, but charges an affordable price on hiring firms for job postings.
“Today, we have over 500 companies and over 40,000 trabahunters, with both parties enjoying a 30-percent success rate from initial pairing to shortlisting,” Williams said.
“For jobs, we have more than 1,000 jobs [posted]. Right now, everyday we’re signing up companies. The target is 50 to 100 jobs per day [at the] minimum per location. So, hopefully, by the end of the year we can have one jobseeker [who] will be [having] one available job post for him,” FindWork Country Head Rommel Torres said. Beyond the private sector, the company also has forged alliances with local government units, such as Manila, Makati and Taguig.
“We are partners with the mayors and congressmen to have job fairs per barangay [within their respective areas of jurisdiction],” he said.
“[In the] next few weeks, we will be in [the] Calabarzon and Camanava [areas], and the next few months, we will be launching also in different cities, [such as] Cebu and Davao, with the help of our partners in Tesda to make sure that everyone will have a job in the location that’s near them.”