From Skilling to Deployment: A Case for Labour-Market Intermediaries

India’s technology discourse today is overwhelmingly dominated by artificial intelligence (AI). The scale, speed, and breadth of AI adoption across sectors has created a perception—sometimes exaggerated—that labour is becoming progressively irrelevant to economic growth. This perception is analytically flawed.

India’s growth story over the next two decades will remain decisively anchored in the physical economy: green energy, electric vehicles, infrastructure, real estate, mining, refining, component manufacturing, assembly lines, logistics, warehousing, rail–road–air transport, and e-commerce, etc. All of these sectors continue to require large numbers of blue-collar and grey-collar workers. AI may reshape tasks and productivity, but it does not eliminate the need for skilled labour.

The real constraint, I argue, is no longer labour availability. It is labour mobilisation, matching, reliability, and trust. 

A small funding round with a large signal

Against this backdrop, the fundraise by WorkIndia, a couple of days back, deserves attention. WorkIndia, India's largest recruitment platform for blue and grey-collar workers, raised ₹97 crore in its latest fundraising round, as reported by PTI. This Series B fundraise will be used to upgrade WorkIndia's technology platform, improve job matching between employers and candidates, expand into new high-demand regions, and drive innovation

In isolation, this is not a sensational fundraise. In context, it is a meaningful signal.

Over the past 12–18 months, India’s startup funding environment has been tight, especially outside AI, SaaS, and consumer internet. Very few recruitment platforms—particularly those focused on non-white-collar labour—have attracted significant capital. That, investors are willing to back a company operating in what is often perceived as a low-glamour and operationally complex, indicates a re-assessment: labour-market infrastructure itself is becoming investable.

This is not entirely unprecedented. Platforms such as 'apna' have raised substantial capital in earlier years, and a handful of other workforce and recruitment startups serving blue-collar segments have raised seed or early-stage funding. However, fresh mid-stage funding in this segment remains rare—making WorkIndia’s fundraise notable.

The institutional gap in India’s labour market

India has invested heavily in skilling and education infrastructure: ITIs, polytechnics, secondary vocational streams, apprenticeships, and short-term training programmes. Yet outcomes remain uneven. One reason is structural.

Large industrial enterprises, MSMEs, and fast-growing startups cannot practically visit hundreds or thousands of training schools to recruit workers. Nor can they efficiently verify credentials, assess practical skills, map worker preferences, and manage high attrition in labour-intensive roles. Direct recruitment at scale is costly, fragmented, and slow.

This creates a classic coordination failure:

Workers exist.

Skills exist.

Demand exists.

Matching mechanisms are weak.

Recruitment platforms, operating at scale, can fill this gap.

Recruitment platforms as labour-market infrastructure

Platforms like WorkIndia are often described narrowly as “job portals”. In reality, their potential role is far broader.

At scale, such platforms can:

Physically verify worker identities and credentials

Tag and categorise skills beyond formal certificates

Map preferences (location, shift type, sector, wage tolerance)

Groom or tailor candidates to employer requirements

Continuously source from the unorganised labour market, where churn is high

In effect, they convert a vast, informal, and opaque labour pool into legible, deployable human capital. This function is infrastructural, not merely transactional.

Why this model would work

From a policy and economic standpoint, the idea is viable for several reasons.

First, firms have a clear incentive. Recruitment, verification, and onboarding of blue- and grey-collar workers are non-core activities. Outsourcing these functions reduces transaction costs, accelerates hiring, and improves retention through better matching.

Second, workers benefit materially. Platforms reduce dependence on contractors and informal middlemen, improve job continuity, and allow workers to signal skills and preferences more effectively. This is particularly valuable for migrants and workers without strong social networks.

Third, the state benefits without expanding bureaucracy. Governments struggle to directly intermediate labour markets at scale. Encouraging private platforms allows the state to improve employment outcomes without creating new administrative machinery.

Fourth, investor behaviour validates feasibility. Labour-intensive, operational businesses typically struggle to attract capital unless unit economics improve with scale. The fact that funding is flowing—though not abundantly—into this space suggests that technology-enabled recruitment is crossing that threshold.

At a deeper level, the model would work because it reframes India’s labour challenge correctly. India does not necessarily suffer from a labour shortage/surplus problem; it suffers from a labour coordination and intermediation problem.

The appropriate role of governments

The case here is not for government-run recruitment platforms. That would be inefficient and brittle. Instead, governments should encourage, legitimise, and integrate such platforms into the broader skilling–employment ecosystem.

These can include:

Recognition of recruitment platforms as formal labour-market intermediaries

Standardisation of verification and skill-tagging norms

Data-sharing partnerships with training institutions and certification bodies

Outcome-linked incentives based on placement quality and retention

The state’s role, therefore, is to enable and de-risk, not to operate.

Conclusion

The WorkIndia fundraise round is not just a startup story. It is an indicator that India’s labour-market architecture is quietly evolving.

As AI reshapes cognitive tasks while physical industries continue to expand, the central challenge is no longer whether jobs will exist, but how effectively labour can be organised, validated, and deployed at scale. The absence of robust intermediaries has long forced firms to rely on fragmented, informal, and inefficient hiring channels. Recruitment platforms operating in the blue- and grey-collar space address this gap directly by professionalising what has historically been an ad-hoc process.

Encouraging the growth of such platforms, therefore, is less about backing individual startups and more about strengthening the 'connective tissue' of the industrial economy. If designed and administered sensibly—through light-touch regulation, standards, and integration with skilling systems—these platforms can become value-additive and durable labour-market institutions. 

In doing so, they would help ensure that India’s industrial growth ambitions are matched by equally robust mechanisms for mobilising and deploying its vast human capital.