Naukri and ECHO India roll out job platform for covid-19 healthcare staff

Jobs portal Naukri.com, in collaboration with ECHO India, has launched a platform to help hospitals meet the shortage of healthcare professionals, which poses a challenge before them in tackling the covid-19 caseload.

The partnership, officially announced 10 August, will act as a bridge between healthcare professionals such as doctors, nurses, lab technicians and support staff, and hospitals across the country, irrespective of whether they are owned privately, by the government, or are owned under a public private partnership.

Till now, 69 hospitals, including Lilavati Hospital and Research Centre and Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in Mumbai; Max Hospital in Delhi; and Apollo Hospital in Chennai, have registered to take advantage of the initiative.

Of the 1,500 healthcare professionals registered to date, the majority are nurses, followed by doctors, lab technicians and others. Not surprisingly, the highest registrations are from Mumbai and Delhi, which have the largest concentration of healthcare professionals. Although hospitals from almost all states have shown interest in hiring temporary staff, demand is particularly high from Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Besides screening for suitable candidates, ECHO India will provide them with covid-19 safety training online. While this is not a call for permanent job role that hospitals are seeking, it will be a paid stint with hospital and the applicant arriving at a mutual remuneration amount and duration of work.

“The shortage of health staff is a serious issue, and we thought there might be doctors, nurses or others who might want to work for a short duration to lend a hand in treating covid-19 patients. Through the portal, we will play matchmakers by screening the candidate and matching them to hospitals which require their services. By doing the primary screening, it will ease pressure on hospitals,” said Dr Kumud Rai, chairman and managing trustee of ECHO India, an NGO focused on capacity building training in the healthcare sector. “We are not duplicating what the government is doing but augmenting it,” he added.

For Info Edge India, the parent company of Naukri.com, the partnership is an act of giving back by providing the technology support and host the portal on its datacenters. “Joining hands with the ECHO Trust has been purely from the intention of trying to plug the shortage of healthcare professionals needed to tackle covid-19. We have also reached out to jobseekers from healthcare industry, registered on Naukri.com, informing them of the initiative,” said Hitesh Oberoi, managing and CEO of Info Edge India.

Since the pandemic, Naukri.com has noticed an increase in searches for staff nurse; lab technicians and medical officers are actively using the portal too. As far as registrations, there is over 20% growth from these professionals in the last two months over the pre-covid-19 period, Oberoi added.