A letter to our Future CTO

Babajob started as an experiment to help everyone – regardless of their literacy, income and computer skills – elevate their class level by finding a better job. We help households and companies like OLA, Puma and SnapDeal hire drivers, rural delivery workers, office helpers, housekeeping staff, cashiers, cooks and countless other roles in the modernizing economy of India.

2014 was awesome for us. We added 2 million job seekers, 50,000 employers, grew to 60 employees and launched two amazing products - Missed Calls for Jobs on 0888 000 4444 and RapidHire, which guarantees calls to employers from screened applicants in minutes.

2015 will be even more amazing as we truly scale Babajob.com into a tool for everyone in India to improve their livelihoods. To do this, we must scale and push our product to enable employers to hire and retain aspiring labor in vast numbers.

We must scale our ability to experiment, to build a great development culture, to drive hires to occur reliably and yet digitally, to re-architect our services and client experiences to help tens and later hundreds of millions get hired.  Any job seeker across India must be able to call us, navigate our IVR system in multiple languages, register a fantastic and accurate profile of their skills and desires, understand which jobs are best for them, be assessed and then call connected to employers who report back they were happy to interview and hire them. It’s frankly an entirely different vision of what an online job platform must do.   

The challenge ahead is something that I hope is both daunting and terribly exciting to you. In the next year, we must go from handling 20,000 missed calls a day now to 200,000; from 1m desktop and mobile visitors a month to 20 million, from a Dev team of 9 to 50 and an operations and sales team of 25 to 250. Ideally, I need you to have lived through this kind of growth and company transformation at another startup, because we haven’t and could use some steady hands.

Your job in all this is to tend the heart of our business, a digital – and hence globally scalable– engine to drive hires of aspiring workers. You cannot do this alone. Obviously, I and the rest of our Dev, Sales and Management teams will help you, but you must be able to attract a stellar collection of developers, designers and PMs. You must inspire them and create a culture where they do their best work - creatively, passionately and rigorously. We’re believers in the Scott Cook philosophy of customer observation, fast experimentation and iteration. We believe that in the end, it is only if we institutionalize that culture that we’ll achieve our mission. We hope you agree.

Our model of scale is a business – we are only going to serve all those aspiring job seekers if we have employers who are happy to repeatedly pay us and we generate significant profits to keep growing. You’ll need work extensively with our Sales teams to make their jobs easier and evolve our product to better sell itself and delight employers over and over.

As CTO, you own our technical choices and our roadmap.  I and my co-founder happened to begin our careers at Microsoft and hence our server stack is .NET and MSSQL today (along with a bunch of Redis, ElasticSearch and JS and analytics libraries). You’ll have to figure out if it’s worth the effort to move from MSFT, when and at what cost. We have incredible distribution partners, marketing teams and viral word of mouth that are going to push users down your throat faster than you can handle; you and our Dev team must decide how we spend our most precious resource – our time - to accommodate all of them. We need wonderful experiences for employers and job seeker across the web, mobile apps and voice experiences; your team must design them, prioritize and iterate them to perfection.

We will pay you well. You will be given a founder-level equity package. When we achieve our mission and have hundreds of millions of users, you will be very rich.  In the end though, I want you to want this job because you want all that technical genius in your head to directly benefit millions of people across the earth who frankly were not lucky enough to be you.

I worked at Microsoft for 10 years and loved my job. I left because I knew I had the potential and skill to build products that scale and Babajob felt like the very best use of my skills to positively impact the world. I hope you feel likewise.

Isn’t it obvious over the coming decade, every working age person will be able to use their phone to get the best, closest, highest paying and most fulfilling job for them? Doesn’t that feel like a human right? Are you excited to make that a reality?

If you want to change the world with your code and be our CTO, please mail me at sean AtTheRateSign babajob.com. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Cheers,

Sean Blagsvedt

CEO and Founder, Babajob.com