As the whole world has rolled up sleeves against the novel coronavirus and Covid19, the effect of pandemic and lockdown is showing its ugly face in India too. Amidst the national lockdown, many firms have chosen layoffs to cut on costs and thus thousands of real talented employees are now jobless.
In these uncertain times, Daya Prakash, Ex-CIO of LG India, has innovated by offering a unique pay-as-you-wish model, through his firm, TalentOnLease.
The firm had been successfully serving about 20-25 small, medium and large customers before Covid-19 hit the global economy. Suddenly, within a few weeks it realized that things weren’t moving in the right direction as the candidates who had offers in hand, and were supposed to join new companies suddenly saw their offers getting revoked. The firm also got communication from some of its clients to put all open positions on hold till further communication.
Says Daya Prakash, Founder of TalentOnLease, “We studied industry wide impact on jobs in India and quickly realized that many people had already lost jobs and many were going to in coming weeks to months. We have seen a vast majority of people coming out to support human kind in different ways i.e. donating money and providing food etc to fight this pandemic. We at TalentOnLease strongly feel that it’s our social responsibility to do its bit in helping the Indian economy to stand back on its feet. So we were thinking of ways to do our bit of contribution beyond donation and other charity work. We realized that we had enough resources with us to support especially those people who have lost their job due to #Covid19. We initially thought to extend our recruitment services absolutely free of cost for our customers. However this would have left us high and dry and we could face the challenge of self survival.”
This led to the creation of the unique pay-as-you-wish model. “We thought of creating a fine balance where the objective is not to earn profits but we make sure that we do it in a self sustainable manner. Thus the rise of the “Pay-As-You-Wish” model. This gives flexibility to customers in deciding if they wish to ask us for a 100% discount. Eventually we want to measure the impact of our contribution by the number of people we could help through this initiative and not by any other means. It would also be an important benchmark for us to be able to retain the current team through this tough time. To achieve our goal, we are introducing this option for our recruitment service where clients could ask up to 100% discount on our services till the end of June’20.”
Daya Prakash has urged companies to share their open IT positions with it and in turn, the company will will help in identifying who to hire from a pool of talented resources.