Former Apple employee creates app to connect millions of Indian migrant laborers with work

Apna
Apna (Image credit: Apna)

What you need to know

  • A former Apple employee is helping millions of Indians find jobs.
  • Nirmit Parikh has created Apna to help India's millions of low-skilled, migrant laborers.
  • 1.25 million have signed up for the app, and over 1 million interviews have been arranged as a result.

A new Bloomberg report has revealed how a former Apple employee has created Apna, a job app to connect millions of migrant laborers in India with work.

From the report:

Parikh, a 32-year-old Apple Inc. alum with an MBA from Stanford, has created Apna, which he envisions as a sort of LinkedIn for non-English-speaking, nonaffluent Indians. When these people move to the cities, they typically find work via small-time employment agencies or on street corners crowded with men and women waiting for someone to hire them for a few hundred rupees a day. With Apna, job seekers enter their name, age, and skills to generate a virtual "business card" that's passed out to employers in Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, and Pune, with more cities on the way. "A digital business card is a confidence booster for many who've only seen their super bosses carry business cards," Parikh says. "We want to give millions of bottom-of-pyramid workers a career path."

Interestingly, despite Parikh's two-year stint at Apple in its Product & Strategy department for the iPhone, the app isn't currently available on the App Store, only Google Play. Despite this, 1.25 million people have signed up for the app, and its website says that it has helped arrange over a million interviews in the last 30 days alone.

As the report notes, millions of low-skilled workers in India "crowd into shantytowns and slums" after traveling to the cities from villages hundreds of miles away. The coronavirus pandemic has seen many of them left out of work.

The app was reportedly created out of Parikh's own experience trying to hire a welder decades ago, after which he realized "the system was broken."

You can read the full report here.

Stephen Warwick
News Editor

Stephen Warwick has written about Apple for five years at iMore and previously elsewhere. He covers all of iMore's latest breaking news regarding all of Apple's products and services, both hardware and software. Stephen has interviewed industry experts in a range of fields including finance, litigation, security, and more. He also specializes in curating and reviewing audio hardware and has experience beyond journalism in sound engineering, production, and design. Before becoming a writer Stephen studied Ancient History at University and also worked at Apple for more than two years. Stephen is also a host on the iMore show, a weekly podcast recorded live that discusses the latest in breaking Apple news, as well as featuring fun trivia about all things Apple. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwarwick9