Startup story: How multi-crore biz GigChain is empowering blue collar workforce?
GigChain hires blue-collar workers with a complete selection process which includes basic communication skills, background checks, etc.
Trina Das, a Gurugram-based entrepreneur whose main aim is to help blue-collar workers, has built a multi-crore business with her partners by providing employment opportunities to common laborers. However, she started her career as a tutor in West Bengal.
Inspired by her socially conscious father, she started teaching Maths and Physics to students from small towns in West Bengal and ended up opening multiple branches worldwide.
Her education work model got global recognition and she has conferred the Global Student Entrepreneur Award (Asia) in 2012 and was named an Emerging Global Entrepreneur in 2015, with a grant of USD 10,000 from Barack Obama in 2015.
“I was not prepared for such a huge recognition from the White House. Teaching was my passion and I was happy with it. But I always had an internal feeling about doing something more impactful and sold my education business to a Kolkata-based company,” Trina Das told LiveMint.
Apart from the edtech company, she started a recruitment firm called ‘Talent Labs Pvt Ltd’ with two of her friends Arun Shehrawat and Neeraj Dahiya in 2017 as a side business. “We started helping companies hire for executive tech roles. But we started hiring for all kinds of roles over the next two years.”
“In 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country, we started receiving hundreds of calls from workers who got placed through us. They were fired overnight. They had no clue what to do next and how to manage their finances and family expenses. So being an entrepreneur, we wanted to help them. At that time, we started focusing only on blue-collar hiring," Trina explained.
She said that there are more than 50 companies in the pipeline waiting to avail their services and the company reached more than ₹100 crores of annual revenue FY 2021-22.
“We were depressed about how the workforce is being managed even in larger companies and that is when we decided to create a working model where we can control the salary and management of workers. Specifically, we wanted to ensure that workers are respected and experience an equitable opportunity for career growth. This is how we ideated Gigchain in July 2022. We earned around 3.5 lakhs in revenue in the very first month and we kept on growing,” the entrepreneur told LiveMint in a telephonic conversation.
She was further asked about Gigchain's business model and how they get blue-collar workers posted at several companies.
“It's quite similar to the Urban company model or you can say Uber where workers work as our gigger partners. We have a team of recruiters who look for blue-collar workers. We hire blue-collar workers on the basis of a selection process, like basic communication skills (be it local language), background checks, KYC details, etc. After this, we train those workers and put them in our gigger pool,” Trina described.
When asked about the flow of work for gigs during layoffs, she said that giggers associated with Gigchain are flexible, and they are not dependent on one particular organization for earnings.
“We are coordinating with many companies to outsource the team and workers they are not sure of employment, from us. This model is helping giggers. They are now professionally prepared to serve multiple companies, not only one. They are not dependent on one source of earnings or salary. They have become flexible now,” she said.
Trina shared that the founders' future endeavor is to build the ‘most efficient workforce management system’ across the world.
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First Published:26 Mar 2023, 01:16 PM IST
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