Lumina, an employment forum app, is in the business of helping Indonesia's blue-collar workers find jobs. Established in September 2021, the company received an undisclosed amount of seed funding in January.

Lumina cofounder and CEO Aswin Andrison spoke with The Jakarta Post’s Eisya A. Eloksari on Tuesday about the company’s vision and goals for the future.

Question: What inspired you to create Lumina, and what problems is Lumina trying to solve?

Answer: When my start-up, Stoqo, closed down in 2020 due to the pandemic, former employees were still looking out for each other through a WhatsApp group, and this inspired me to create a worker forum in which everyone could look for jobs together and review job offerings.

We want to create a network of quality blue-collar and gray-collar workers that are tech savvy and able to work in growth-oriented companies. We also want to help companies and small businesses double or even triple their curriculum vitae screening and find the worker that matches their needs.

In your opinion, what is the state of blue-collar workers in Indonesia?

There are a lot of them, and companies seem to think that they are not productive, but I think this is a traditional way of looking at it, because when given the chance and motivation, they are resilient.

We have seen in the past decade that workers that used to work in traditional companies are now shifting to technology-based firms in e-commerce and logistics, for example. So they learn new things and are able to adapt.

What are some pain points from recruiters and jobseekers that you observe?

Hiring efficiency, lack of knowledge and tools. I don’t think a CV is an effective way to communicate [qualifications for a job], because from the jobseeker’s side, they might not receive proper training on building a CV. 

Meanwhile, recruiters also have to screen thousands of candidates, and sometimes people do not show up for interviews because applicants may aimlessly send their CVs to a lot of different companies and decide later on that they do not want to work there.

This is why Lumina is building a community where recruiters and jobseekers can interact. We use social-media-like features in the forum, which hopefully increases a company’s recruiting productivity, because we found that even when workers are not able to write a good CV, they are active on social media and like to engage on such platforms. 

How has your business developed so far?

Since we launched 5 months ago, we now have 140,000 workers registered on our platform and aim to reach 1 million users soon. 

We already have tens of thousands of companies on our platform as well. These companies range from e-commerce to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) firms looking for sales personnel, warehouse or factory workers and drivers.

We recently closed a seed funding round, and we are part of an accelerator program. So investors are sure that matching employers and workers is an interesting problem to solve.

What is your plan for 2022 and beyond?

This year, we want to focus on growing our user base, further expanding our community and increasing their engagement time. Within the next year, we still want to focus on improving our recruiting technology.

We are also still focusing our marketing in Greater Jakarta and Java in the first quarter of the year, but we want to expand to more than a dozen new cities by the end of 2022.

In the long run, we want to tap into managing payrolls as well as providing savings and loans or finding the right fintech to do this. We also plan to tap into education technology to provide training and certification for workers. 

Sometimes companies think training is expensive [and offers] low return on investment, but I think upskilling workers is important to increase their capabilities.