9 hours with 2 companies: This startup allows employers to share human resources

Broadly, there are three shades of employment. There is regular employment, contractual and freelancing. This decade's avatar of freelancing is the gig economy where the worker is an independent contractor who relies on digital platform companies for work. But what if some of the rules of the sharing economy are applied to employment? The result could be a new form of work where one human resource is shared between two companies.

A Vadodara-based start-up, Sharedpro, is promoting a model where talent is optimised. Smaller companies find it difficult to hire a data scientist, for instance - they are both expensive and rare in India. Sharing the employee becomes cost effective. The employee, on the other hand, divides the eight-nine hours between the two companies and earns like a regular employee.

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Business Today recently spoke to Sujit Singh, Co-founder and CEO of Sharedpro. He thinks the human resource sharing model is a cross between regular employment and freelancing. Here's how it works:

Initially, say two companies might have similar job openings. Sharedpro does the matchmaking between employees and the two employers. The first employer interviews candidates and shortlists. The shortlisted candidates are next evaluated by the second employer and one candidate is hired.

Second, once the employers agree to hire, who gets to do the payroll is decided. Sharedpro negotiates - while one employer holds the payroll, the second pays the hired employee via the Sharedpro platform. There are cases where no company wants to hold the payroll. In such cases, the payroll is outsourced to a third party.

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The final issue relates to how the employee divides time between the two employers? The companies and the employee agree to shifts. An 8-hour work day can be split into a 9 am-1 PM slot and a 3 PM-7 PM one, for instance. An app helps the employee manage all his tasks. It has features such as 'shift requests'. Sharedpro has access to the employee's data such as reporting time, whether they are getting paid on time or not. While the employment agreement is signed between the employer and the employee, Sharedpro's agreement is for operations and support.

Singh says his company is currently operative in Vadodara and is launching in Delhi NCR in March. He has 18 companies who work on the sharing model till date and another 28 have signed up.

"We are trying partnerships with co-working spaces. They have 25-30 employers in the same premises. Sharing becomes quite easy," the co-founder says. Sharing professionals in demand includes Dev Ops engineers, graphic designers, data analysts, Machine Learning engineers, and content creators.

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