Priyanka Karwa, mother of 2, has been working with us remotely from Thane for the past 8 years. She lives with her family.
Hiring working mothers remotely has laid the foundation of our company even before the pandemic.
In 2015, when we were working on legal education at our first startup iPleaders, we were struggling to hire smart and dedicated people.
As a bootstrapped startup, we could not compete with the budget of funded startups and large companies.
We spent hours interviewing and speaking to talented candidates, but many good candidates would not join as they were not convinced about our future.
Others did not want to take the ownership and responsibility that the job required.
Even those who joined left shortly after getting trained with us for brand name jobs that paid them 2x-3x.
That is when we stumbled upon the idea of hiring work-from-home mothers who could not otherwise work in traditional full-time office jobs.
One of our learners recommended that we interview Priyanka Karwa, who lived in the same building.
She had taken tuitions for school kids earlier.
Priyanka started by working part-time for 6 hours. She did very well, and we gave her more responsibilities.
She later went on to head operations in our company.
Today, she heads our placement and freelancing team, which comprises 50+ people, and delivers success to approx. 1600+ students every month.
She also funded the purchase of her husband’s clinic with her earnings so that he could grow his practice as a dentist when he was facing a financial crunch post COVID.
When our content head left, we hired Komal Shah on a part-time basis, a legal and compliance officer with 13+ years multinational experience, to write content for our courses.
There was no way we could hire her normally, she was highly qualified having worked in London and Dublin, but she wanted work from home jobs and we were the only ones who offered work from home job in legal domain that time
She went on to become the head of the content team later, and today is a co-founder and Chief Knowledge Officer, and heads our Upwork Agency, pitching to startups and remote clients for work that can be performed by our learners.
Similar results were visible in other departments.
We realised that in general, work-from-home mothers work harder and are more productive than many people who were working from offices. They usually have superior problem-solving skills and are more customer-oriented.
We went 50% remote before lockdown in 2017. Today we have approx. 62% women workforce, of which 60% from small cities.
However, we are sad that millions of women in India are not able to secure such opportunities and have to sacrifice their career to meet their personal obligations, since the remote work revolution was short lived here and organisations insist on working from office.
That is when we decided to support women from India to upskill and work remotely for SMEs, services businesses, startups and professionals in advanced economies like US, UK, Canada, Germany & Dubai.
95% of these businesses are not able to hire high quality talent in their home country, or set up a subsidiary in India or send work to an Indian BPO, but they can work with Indian freelancers directly.
Work-from-home women in India and developing countries have a cost advantage in such roles, and their value generation is further amplified by using AI.
In the last few months, we have been training work-from-home women, especially those who have some professional experience but had to take a career break for personal reasons, to get back into the workforce by performing remote work using AI skill sets.
You can now have the professional success you deserve without worrying about location. You don’t have to choose between family and career.
Many of our learners have already secured very promising results in a matter of a few months.