Opinion Scanning horizons

Nandini joined Scancafe to tide over a dire domestic financial crisis when her father died of a sudden illness just as she was finishing school. She now takes home a five-figure paycheck comparable to call centre salaries,puts household money in the hands of her mother and backs her brother through school. “My relatives and neighbors are admiring that I financially support my family,” she says. Nandini’s story echoes many times over in Scancafe.

As a result of globalisation,offshore back office companies and technology outsourcing firms have employed millions of India’s urban,educated young to write software code,answer customer service calls and do high-end product design for Western corporations.

But Scancafe’s hiring requirement has nothing in common with any of that. “We need no specific education,no language proficiency and no particular technical skillset,” says Naren Dubey,the Wharton-educated co-founder of Scancafe and its India-based chief operating officer. Scancafe never advertises job openings. It does not need to. When the company had 150 new positions a few months ago,word-of-mouth referrals by employees filled up the vacancies in two days and yielded a waiting list of a further 300. Attrition rates are at half the call centre industry average. The typical employee is from a suburban background,mostly schooled in the vernacular,and from lower-middle class families. An employee could be the son of a bus driver or the daughter of a garment factory worker.

This is all new for Dubey who,in his prior job as the director of semiconductor equipment maker Applied Materials’ India offshore development centre in Bangalore,hired Ph.D’s from IIT’s and spent over three-quarters of his time tending to them and trying to keep attrition rates low.

“Our first 20 employees are still with us,” says the ever-surprised Dubey. Scancafe’s business is visual. Training consists of teaching new hires photo editing and processing software. The trainees are ready to go on the floor in a week. Scancafe which has so far scanned 25 million photos and charges between 25 cents to $40 per photo evolved from a business school project between Dubey and his two classmates,an American and a Swiss national.

Scancafe’s employees scan,edit,restore and repair pictures by hand. Each picture takes between four minutes for a regular photograph to a few hours for a major hand repair job. As it moves up the value chain,Scancafe will train its employees to go from photo editing to enhancing pictures and pictorial story-telling.

While it expands on the business front,Scancafe hopes to expand on the social front too. A pilot project is currently underway to train and employ physically disabled school graduates. As a next stop,hiring could be from semi-rural areas. Says Dubey,”The potential talent pool in India is infinite.”

saritha.rai@expressindia.com