India’s informal labour market constitutes the backbone of its service and construction industries, yet the hiring mechanisms within this sector remain highly fragmented and unreliable. Workers continue to depend on labour chowks, middlemen, or interpersonal networks, resulting in inconsistent employment, wage exploitation, and absence of digital identity. Simultaneously, recruiters struggle to locate trustworthy, skilled labour without standardized verification, structured search tools, or wage transparency. This study investigates the use of a digital recruitment platform—Hire Hand—designed to connect workers and recruiters through structured workflows, real-time job alerts, and transparent wage negotiation mechanisms. A mixed-sample study involving 60 workers (covering general labour, home-service workers, and construction-oriented skilled labour) and 20 recruiters was conducted to evaluate platform efficiency, adoption patterns, and labour-market outcomes. Statistical modelling demonstrates improvements in hiring time (67% reduction), worker visibility (240% increase), negotiation success rate (78%), and recruiter trust (81% positive feedback). The platform’s architecture integrates user profiling, verification, workflow automation, and notification systems to address long-standing structural deficiencies in the sector. The findings indicate that digital transformation of grassroots labour markets is not only feasible but highly impactful, offering socio-economic benefits for workers and operational efficiency for recruiters. Hire Hand demonstrates strong potential for large-scale deployment across urban and semi-urban labour ecosystems.
Thakur et al. (Tue,) studied this question.