A blockchain platform for human capital

Startups are gaining prominence as they provide solutions to problems that society faces.

What if a startup itself encounters a problem and gets down to find a solution? This leads to the birth of another startup like Emperify.com, a Hyderabad-based startup, founded by KK Jain in April 2019.

Jain, also founder of AnyTimeLoan.in, experienced helplessness as an employer to monitor employees. Working on the lines of better safe than sorry, Jain opted to utilise blockchain to build a central repository for human capital. The end result is Emperify.com which means employee verification (employment history).

Says Jain, "when it comes to human power, there is no regulation which can ensure that the employee or job seeker is doing their job ethically.

The other major concern a company has to face are employees frequently shifting jobs, past fraud or disciplinary record of a candidate, and abruptly left a company without serving the notice period. This is one of the pain point we are trying to solve."

While an employee joins a new organisation the employer needs to carry the employee's background verification to cross-verify the claims made by that employee.

At present, the verification process includes a third-party company sending their representative physically to the previous organisation to carry out the verification, which is a time consuming, costly, and highly inefficient process. This is the second pain point we are touching upon, Jain adds.

Emperify.com involves four stakeholders - employers, job seekers, academic institutions and financial institutions.

Here, the data is contributed by the stakeholders of this ecosystem. The data includes name of the employee as per employment record, date of joining, unique government authorised number, last working day and reason of termination or resignation.

However, the platform eliminates human intervention, thus leading to a service received at lesser cost and time with higher efficiency, wherein the verification is facilitated 24x7. Secondly, on Emperify.com, an employee stands to get an Emp Score, a reward for untainted employment background.

'At present employees are missing out on the basic skill like the right attitude, commitment and fire. This generation believes that by exchanging offer letters would get them an increase in pay.

To correct this attitude, we have the Emp Score; higher score means clean employment record and the period of employment with a company also adds on to the score. A good score means a benefit of better interest rate while applying for loan, as the risk would be lesser for the banks,' he informs.

Accordingly, as an employee creates their profile on the blockchain platform to build a good score of employability; the academic institutes verify if the candidate has graduated from their particular campus to preserve the sanctity of their title and financial institutions like banks, NBFCs, mutual fund companies etc could utilise the platform to check Emp Score before approving a loan.

The blockchain platform is open and free to sign-up. However, both the employer and employee need to be a free member of Emperify.com to hold access for verification, as the employer would require the employee's unique identification number and an answer to a verification question, for which the answer is known to the employee only.

Whereas, while an employee creates a profile, the information is automatically verified by the platform against the company and institutions named.

Jain says, "startups take nearly seven to 10 years to grow, as any new idea in India takes time to get accepted. If we take the same product in other developed markets, the acceptability is much higher.

Hence, we have kept the platform free for all the stakeholders. After noting a recordable number of traction, we will implement a suitable revenue model."

The startup also has a reward programme called Emp Coin for the HR professionals of a company. "Every human has the tendency to want something more.

If a human resource representative of a company contributes data regularly and accurately, the system will automatically calculate certain amount of coins to the HR, who in turn can convert it into vouchers against any purchase from our partners," the founder explains.

The startup till date has seven partners and looking to tie up with more than 100 partners in the next 18 months.

At present, the platform has 124 employers contributing data, more than 18,000 job seekers, 110 verifiers and 64 institutions from various states across India. The founder has a target to onboard 5,000 employers, one million job seekers, in the next one year. With a five-member tech team, Jain is scouting for another co-founder.

Till date, the startup is self-funded with Rs 45 lakh, and with one month launch period in hand, the founder finds it too early to comment on their prospects.

Walking along the vision of the government of Telangana for creating the State as a blockchain capital, Jain says: "We want Telangana to be on the global map with regard to blockchain as a technology.

We want to showcase Telangana as the first state having the entire job seekers and employers' repository on blockchain. That's our request to the government."

There are numerous job search engines, but Emperify.com, a global solution, is going to be tomorrow's verification engine for employability, concludes Jain.