Inclusive hiring – Insights from P Rajasekharan of v-shesh

What is the story behind v-shesh?

Employment is the litmus test of inclusion for us, always has been.

So, we’ve been singularly focused on ensuring, seeing what we can do to clear the barriers for an individual.

So that the individual is closer to the job and, and in that journey we have met you, Trinayani’s journey, Enable India, Samarthanam, many, many, many, Poonam akka from Vidya Sagar.

Everyone has been a uh some—a guru for us and we’ve learned and we’ve improvised.

So when we started actually, frankly, we didn’t start with disability.

We started—me and my co-founder Shashaank, um, we go a long way.

We studied together in our MBA some 20 years back, I think, now.

Um, we thought we should do something where our hearts and mind meet.

So we picked something; we thought we should solve a societal problem but using a business model.

Because that’s what we knew, we both MBA students and worked in corporate so we knew how businesses operate.

But businesses operate to solve a problem but not necessarily a societal problem, we picked a societal problem.

For us, the problem we picked was for someone to get the first job is generally difficult for most people.

But for people with, from disadvantage backgrounds be it a first generation uh girl child—girl uh graduate,

or an HIV affected person or a person from the LGBTQ  Community or a person with disability, getting the first job is immensely difficult.

So we thought we should try and build a platform.

We had no clue what the platform will be.

Even now, we are evolving that platform to be honest.

At that time we had absolutely no clue.

Uh, we thought we should build a platform where we can make it, make this a level playing field.

Uh, it should not be an ovarian lottery, you know, where I’m born should not determine what kind of job is.

The talent should really meet the employment market in level playing terms.

That’s, that was the central theme of which we started.

So, we started with actually rural areas.

Like, uh, we started with um in setting up a centre in Varanasi.

It was only because a client said, told us—we’ll pay you for our service if you provide us trained people from rural areas, eastern UP, western Bihar you can source.

And the model came clear, that we train them, so that they know what job they’re getting into. and that’s where the model, the semblance of the model also came.

It is not a demand and supply issue.

It’s about employment gap or the gap between the individuals wanting to seek a job, the job seekers and the employers wanting to, wanting to give jobs but not finding them or not finding the right talent.

Or if they find, they quitting earlier then they would desire.

You know, the entire ROI for hiring for the employ—for the employer and the individuals getting the right job.

So we thought—the semblance of the model started evolving saying we got to have them both speak to each other.

Um, that helped us understand what a uh good model would be.

It’s not a simple demand and supply which we actually utterly failed when we started.

And we started we did this work with, we expanded.

This was very successful, we reduced the ROI for companies.

Um, you know, they had a turnover, you know, employee turnover of about 40-50%, we got them to 2 to 3%,

only for government jobs people would quit.

So, and this went on very well for a six seven eight months.

Uh, scaling up, all the microfinance companies that we worked with they were ready to want to, want to sign up with us.

We had, we were doing 20 jobs where we started in 2008.

We started uh delivering 100 jobs a month, you know.

And we had signed contracts of 300 jobs a month.

Then suddenly the microfinance crisis in AP happened and everything came, came to a standstill.

But luckily, you know, so—people with disabilities and um the sector, a huge thanks for V-Shesh’s existence um there.

And it is then we started working with organizations like Enable India.

They were training, the fantastic job of training.

We said can we do some uh work with you to see if we can also place some people from there.

And and me and my Sh—my colleague Shashaank and some of our team members we, we did the job.

We could reach out to companies because we know the language of the companies.

We had friends there, we could speak to them and said okay can you, you know.

And that is where our interactions with individuals like I still can say of course Shanti and Deepesh, but Vidya who who who who was there in Enable India.

We learned about disabilities totally by interacting with them, you know, absolutely.

The nuts and bolts, understanding, what what is the the entire ability factor that I can talk, so, about today.

But we learned it from in action by interacting with the team there.

And then we, we got success placing couple of people.

And then uh when the sector went down,

I mean the sector that we went down and we had no contracts and all the uh database that we had built, all of them, you know, six month they are all stale.

So, one of my colleagues Rashi who is a also a founding team member, she’s now in Delhi.

She said, she told, Shashaank, Raja, why don’t we do the same thing with people with disabilities,

you know, we just have to train people,

we have to look at potential employers and, you know, we can do the same thing.

Okay, let’s try and that’s where we started.

Um, and with five people mostly with mobility, they were all with mobility impairment and it worked well.

By the time we could train them, we could place them in some good companies.

And uh the model was working.

Then uh seeing our success of getting people to jobs, deaf people came to our centre.

And we had no clue of what is deafness, what is sign language.

Um, why deaf people have a challenge with language,

all of that which we know now, we had absolutely no clue.

But only thing that we saw is a person came into our office and said,

you got this person a job, I got he—I got to know about it, why can’t you get me a job.

And I said okay, what have you you studied?

And we couldn’t, we didn’t know sign language, the person wrote—studied Mcom.

What are you doing? I’m working in a shop cutting vegetables.

That completely shook all of us and, you know.

And another colleague Joseph who had joined, Joseph, Rashi, Smriti, me and Shashaank with the first 4-5 employees, we, it completely shook us.

And said we have to do something here and immediately called or said what do we do.

He said—aap kitne—how many of you are there, you know 4, 3-4 people?

He said no, I have lots of people are like this, like me.

They all came, they said how many can you get and how many days.

In two weeks we’ll assemble at your office, in 2 weeks 10 of them uh came to V-Shesh.

And then, then how do we train them now.

Then Rashi said, okay let’s, you know, call check with Enable India, they have some trainers and interpreters.

And said okay, we have a person, one, one of our first employees we hired, I mean Alafia she was moving to Bangalore,

and um would you want to have her, you can, you know, she can work as an interpreter.

Okay, we had Alafia joined us then and uh she and then the story of, we trained them.

Then what happened is after we trained again, the same thing of talking to companies and convincing them to, you know, employ.

Once we um, once they said yes, we are ready then uh we said okay the the skill level is there.

Wh-when it is very obvious, the talent is obviously there,

It took us very little um small um, you know, simple things of what is workplace,

what is an organization and you know employability skills.

And they were they were ready to face the interviews.

And they all aced their interviews.

There’s lot of inventory of very skilled people waiting to get jobs.

So, very little to our credit but more to the talent that was already there.

And uh they got jobs, once they got a job that the company said,

um, okay we have ta-taken them, now who will train them?

That is when we said, okay my colleague Joseph, he went there wis- was with the deaf people, learned uh signs from them.

It was a night shift so Alafia couldn’t go and Joseph had to go.

He learned signs from them, in fact, Shakir who is one of the deaf employees who who works with India Post now.

He’s one of, he’s the guru for us in showing what can be done at the workplace as a job coach.

And later on I read this is a service that companies offer for, etc.

But at that time we developed a job coach.

And after that they said okay we also want to be trained about little communication.

Train, teachers basic sign language and then we, we did some sign language training for the other team members.

So basically, Ritika, what we did was we responded to what the clients want, which is companies want and what individuals want.

And over an, over a period we remained focused to our mission of employment and kept on  adding to our services.

And a package of services kept on developing over a period of time and that’s, that’s the story of V-Shesh.

We continued the same story.

How do you assess the skills of the persons with disabilities and match them to suitable job opportunities?

Fundamentally when an individual disability comes to V-Shesh, you know, for a counselling or career guidance or training.

Uh, we are a team of 50 spread across Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai.

And we have frontline team members who’ve become confident, disability confident interacting and building that rapport.

So we look at one, yes, what is the impairment of that individual and for that we need to provide accommodations.

For attending a test or writing uh attending interviews or when it gets to the job there’s an accommodation.

So, there is an impairment of that individual for which accommodations is required.

The second element is understanding the skill level of the individual.

And that is not- that’s not nothing to do with the disability, it is the skill.

So know whether the, where the person stands in terms of uh English language.

Or proficiency in uh in numeracy skills or proficiency in use of computers.

Basic proficiency test we we do conduct.

And we don’t match impairments to jobs or disability to jobs.

We match individual skills to what the job demands, okay.

So the, we have once we assessed and we are comfortable with the skill level,

we then show these are the jobs that are available, you know.

There’s a job which requires content moderation, looking at videos

and understanding the the English content, and editing, and being able to give inputs there.

Or there is a job in IT which requires you to test, do software testing or programming.

And if the person has the skill, we say yes, you have, we know also broadly.

Sometimes the person may not have the skill, may have an aspiration we have to do that moderation, etc.

Then if it doesn’t have, no but he says yes I can, I can do it.

Okay, the market is there, you please go for that interview.

If you don’t, we also have our training programs to improve the skill level of that individual.

So, that’s how we operate.

So we, essentially we segregate the individuals disability or impairment for accommodation.

And the skill is like anyone else, a person of disability is like anyone else can get jobs based on their own uh skills.

What was the initial reaction of the companies you approached regarding your organization’s service model and charges?

Uh, when we started off 15 years back, we offered this as a service.

We thought it’s like any other service.

Any anyone should be find value in our service, in our offering.

So we approached companies saying, okay we have trained pool, will you employ them? And this is our service fee.

The company said, hey, just a second huh, you’re saying we’re going to employ from you, I’m doing you a favour.

And employ a person with disability, I’m also doing another favour.

Then you’re saying, you will charge me for this, are you, are you for real?

That was the question about 15 years back.

But we had complete confidence in the individual’s talent, you know.

So I knew that there is a gap this there is a, there is a complete gap of awareness.

So we said, we had, we had complete confidence in the individuals.

We said, okay don’t pay us now, please hire.

Please, you know, 3 months later you’ll see the the productivity, everything coming into play.

Pay us later after 3 months, if it is fine you pay us, if it is not you don’t.

That they agreed because they don’t, don’t have to pay us instantly.

Then after 3 months we followed up.

We usually, with every placement, uh we follow up with the candidate as well as uh the uh the—and the employer

We followed up and said yes, excellent, they very good.

Then like you pay most of your other talent hires, you pay us also.

For us it was about giving a good service,  being accountable to the clients whom we are service—servicing so that we can challenge ourselves and keep improving as a team.

And also, it brings the central focus to an individual whom we are servicing, we servicing the individual here for jobs.

And for all of us, to think to every part of our work in the whatever we do, we do sensitization, we do policy change, we work on um uh workshops for audits, we do access audits as well.

Everything we do is to clear the path for a person of disability to get a job.

So the mission is very very clear.

If we stop um being um understanding what a person requires in terms of accessing a job,

we will stop, you know, our, you know, V-Shesh will have to shut shop.

So, it made us very very clear that our our ultimate goal is to improve the odds of a person get getting a job.

So we were very—it took us about 6 months, 8 months to get companies to figure out, that yes, there is a value in this service.

And over a period of time they now recognize, and you know we built a range of service offerings which they see value and pay us.

Does your organization charge a fee to persons with disabilities for training and employment services?

For us, persons with disability is also our customer like.

But we don’t charge them a service like Facebook never charges its customers,

but is accountable to the to the customer.

We are also fully accountable, our team is fully accountable

because as I said earlier we will shut shop if we don’t serve a person with disability.

And why we don’t charge is employment.

We, we are promising training and employment, okay.

Uh, now a lot of them come to us with the hope of employment.

Their final outcome, what they see is, I come do, I do something with with V-Shesh, I like what they do.

Um, we have we we engage, we probably move our skill um, you know, to some extent.

But finally and I, they’re going to measure on whether I get a job or not.

And getting a job is not entirely within V-Shes’s ambit, you know.

There’s employers, the sensitization, the employers may or may not be ready.

Readiness of the employment is very very different there

of course there’s fluctuations the employment market.

The employer readiness is also far.

So from from an affordability angle, from the uncertainty to getting a job

and weighing all these factors in mind, we decided not to charge.

It’s not a not it’s definitely not something like a person of disability cannot pay for our service.

It’s only because of the uncertainty of connecting a job, we thought best not to charge.

There are exceptions in our work, uh, we are not saying we should not charge a person with disability.

I mean, there is people with disabilities are also can also afford,

they can get a job, they earn they pay tax, and they can return they can also afford such services.

But because of the uncertainty uh that associated with an employment, we were not charging.

But some exceptions there are individuals and families, especially.

And and in especially neurodivergent conditions where they want to get have their their their their children, students or adults, young adults ready for the job market.

And they have they come to us with a very specific ask of getting trained on XYZ skills.

The clear ask is skills for, for getting ready to a job.

They say financial literacy, coming and going to office, other executive functioning, please train us.

There we do charge where and we offer scholarships for people who will not able to afford the the fees.

Does V-Shesh specialize in any particular sector for employing individuals with disabilities?

Ideally, we would like to focus on all sectors.

But we have been focusing on sectors where there is a demand, where the employers are more ready, more progressive, I would say.

Using the word progressive but from a sense of including persons with disabilities.

So, IT has been at the forefront uh and banking has been at the forefront.

A few examples in manufacturing and then uh hospitality and retail.

Uh, these are the four sectors and a little bit of trickle in manufacturing in aviation, etc.

What are your views on providing reasonable accommodations in the workplace for persons with disabilities?

When it comes to disability accommodation, most companies have a fear of the unknown of what they’re wanting to get into, you know.

They don’t know what they have to provide for and then there is also the cost factor but it is not that big a factor.

Just for statistics uh I can say that you know from whatever placements we do, we do some thousand odd numbers every year.

70 odd person do not need any accommodation, so there’s no cost involved at all, the rest 30, the costs are so less.

So, cost is not that that many that big a fact.

All that we have we try and do when it comes to accommodation is very clearly calling out this is what they need.

You know, they need a different um keyboard or a different type of a mouse or a adjustable desk.

And they say, oh this is all they need, are you sure this is all they need.

Yes, most importantly they will need this as a accommodation. and then your sensitivity to hear to them.

They may ask some smaller, smaller things, I’ll need a break, I’ll.

You shouldn’t think, oh they I’ve provided this, I need this also and this also, that should not be the factor.

Once you have that sensitivity and listening approach towards an employee,

it’s what you need for every employee.

This is a talent that is coming in, if you’re being sensitive and giving that opportunity for them to speak up and and listen, you listen things start falling in place.

So, that’s my theory on accommodations.