India's employment market runs on three parallel tracks that rarely touch each other.
Blue collar / entry level (factories, retail, delivery, hospitality): Placement brokers — called "placement agents," "jobbers," or in some states "subreddits" (कारखाना मजदूर) — sit in every industrial area and labor chowk. A worker wanting a factory job pays INR 500–3,000 to the broker, who calls when a slot opens. The employer often pays nothing; the broker is subsidized by the candidate's desperation. Some factories use labor contractors (registered under the Contract Labour Act), who maintain a roster and supply workers on demand. WhatsApp groups for construction labor, delivery riders, and security guards are now pervasive — but managed manually by a supervisor or HR person who screenshots rosters and forwards numbers.
White collar / mid-level (2–15 LPA jobs): Naukri.com is the dominant platform — used by nearly every company that can afford a subscription, and by nearly every jobseeker with internet access. LinkedIn has significant penetration among 3–10 year experience professionals in metros. For campus hires, companies rely on company-specific career pages and, at scale, third-party campus platforms like Superset or directly through NIT/IIM placement cells. SMEs and startups use a mix of Naukri (often the free tier), LinkedIn, and word of mouth.
Volume hiring (BPO, KPO, ITES, retail front-end, logistics): Staffing firms — primarily TeamLease, Quess Corp, and Adecco India — handle bulk contract hiring. They maintain their own candidate databases, send bodies, and bill on a per-head or monthly retainer basis. Campus placement drives happen via shared platforms run by聯合 campuses (NIT Kraft, IIM Indore, etc.) but are heavily managed by college T&P cells manually.
The SME reality (50–500 employee companies, the job creation engine): These companies — manufacturers, trading houses, local retail chains, regional hospitals, logistics firms — do NOT use Naukri subscriptions or staffing firms. They cannot afford the fees. They hire through:
- The owner's WhatsApp: "bhai koi chef chahiye, Mere wife forwarded it to 3 groups"
- Walk-ins with a handwritten sign on the gate
- Asking existing staff for referrals (informal bounty: INR 2,000–10,000 per hire, paid cash)
- Local job fairs (organized by municipal bodies or NGOs)
- A relationship with a neighborhood "job broker" who knows local workers
- Vacancy open → candidates flood in via WhatsApp → manual screening of 50–200 messages and resumes (done by the owner or one HR person, who has other work)
- Reference checks: almost never happen in practice for non-corporate hires. When they do, it's a 5-minute phone call to a number the candidate provided — unverifiable and easily gamed.
- Offer stage: candidate ghosts, or demands 3 more days, or takes another offer while the company deliberates. No tracking system.
- Background verification: only done for formal sector jobs through third-party firms (FADV, IDfy, Verifacts); INR 300–2,000 per check; takes 3–7 days; small companies skip it.
- Coordination: scheduling, reminders, location sharing, document collection — all done via individual WhatsApp chats. One open vacancy at a time means one HR person juggling 15 candidate conversations simultaneously.